


Rift And Break

by antiheroines



Series: The Eclipse Chronicles [1]
Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo, The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo, The Language of Thorns - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Alternate Ending, Angst, Crossover, F/F, F/M, Love, M/M, Separated Lovers, The Language of Thorns, alina and the darkling rule together in the end, and i wanted to read one, baghra is much more important, i have wanted to do this for SO LONG and i couldnt find any fics like this, i literally got an account to post this fic, i love the grishaverse so much, jurda parem, ooc progression, tlot, when i read tlot and the nikolai books i might add some changes/foreshadowing, wink wink
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-02-10 03:27:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 49,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12902955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antiheroines/pseuds/antiheroines
Summary: Where the rift is, the break is.Slowly, a shadow spreads dark wings over the sun. This is an eclipse that will block out not just Ravka, but threaten the entire world.A band of misfit renegades has finally gotten their happy ending. In the Dregs, Kaz is richer than ever; Jesper and Wylan are happily together; Inej is on her mission to make the world a better place; Nina is where she feels she can truly be accepted as a Grisha.Malyen Oretsev has his happy ending, but unhappily, that might end too soon.The Ravkan crown seems secure, and Nikolai Lantsov is working hard to rebuild after civil war.But secretly, in the shadows, there is a dark flutter of wings, a sigh of breath, a scratching of fingernails on worn tabletops. The secrets that an old blind woman left behind are finally emerging; the anger of a soul kept hidden and loveless for centuries, burning through the very fabric of the universe.If not for love, do we ever really die? Do we ever really live?And after a civil war, what happens to the people left behind?How will it end? In darkness? In light? In a Keramzin orphanage?We know how it starts - when an orphan is rescued from a slaver's ship by the Wraith.





	1. Saltwater Waffles

**Author's Note:**

> ooookay so this is my first ever fanfic that i've ever put anywhere!  
> i love the grishaverse so much and fanfics about it are my favourite to read, especially since i was so unhappy with the ending of r&r. what i couldn't seem to find was a crossover between soc and tgt, which i was dying to see. and so i've come up with a sequence of events that happen after canon that will ulitmately just end in our faves being cool and badass again.
> 
> mal dies. :)
> 
> it starts in the pov of a character that doesn't exist in leigh's books, but i've added a couple (most of them poc! yay diversity) in order to help tie the story together and make it possible. hopefully they don't interfere with our faves too much, and we do change back to the canon characters' points of view anyway
> 
> (and i have a tumblr if you want to follow me, it's @feyrelight)

#### Irina

  
Her saviour was a Suli girl, all in death-black: a little, lithe wraith with rich skin, barely older than her, who wielded her knives as if she had been born with them.  
Irina had been stuck in the damp, uncomfortable hold of the slaver’s ship for days, maybe weeks. She couldn’t remember exactly how long; time seemed to swirl and drag around her as she lay there in the dark, occasionally hearing another girl’s cough or uneasy whimper. There had been more girls on the ship at some point, all sad-eyed with broken postures, none older than around eighteen, but now there were only four left: herself and three others. One of them was named Margareta, and she was from somewhere in Kerch. The others were too weak to speak. Irina had tried, but she knew there wasn’t much point to it.

She ached all over. Not just in her raw, chafed lungs, her agonised bones, and her hunger-weakened legs, but in the empty place inside her where her heart would be. She had spent the days thinking of Anastasiya, safe with the other Grisha in the Little Palace, and trying not to cry for her sake. 

Then the opening to the roof had broken open, and fresh air had broken in like a storm current; it was raining outside, and drops landed on Irina’s face as well as the strong, briny scent of the sea. She’d heard yells, and been afraid that the slavers were bringing more girls, or worse – they were finally coming for her, to drag her up and sell her – but she’d realised that the slavers were the ones yelling, and in pain, too. She’d dragged herself up, each muscle screaming, and poked her head out on deck to see what was happening.  
Several slavers – big, burly men with rough accents – were lying on the deck, their bodies sprawled in unnatural positions. Their throats were cut clean, and blood soaked into the already rain-damp planks. 

Irina looked around some more, pushing her matted black hair out of her eyes. She saw the clash of blades, smelt the tang of gunpowder and heard the impact of bullets. Another, smaller ship had pulled up alongside the slave-ship and from it sprang people wielding guns – was that a Zemeni revolver? – and her saviour. The girl in black.  
Irina watched in fascination and horror as the Suli girl moved through the air, slicing and stabbing the slavers with brutal efficiency. Knives were drawn in a flash, muttering something to herself, before she whirled and attacked. This girl was like lightning made flesh in her speed and surety. She moved, too, with the grace of a dancer, stepping in time to a beat only she could hear in the pounding of the rain and the cries of men. Her braid had come loose, and it was a thick black rope, slick with rain and arcing after her in the air as she sent all of the slavers down.

The last of the slavers fell, and Irina cringed in fear when she locked eyes with the Suli girl. Her eyes were a deep brown, like the sunrise over a desert, and they filled with sadness and compassion as she saw Irina quaking in the hold. 

“Please don’t hurt me,” mumbled Irina, but it made no difference. The girl was already wiping off and sheathing her blades as she stalked over to the hold. She turned her head, braid whipping like a snake, as she called to someone behind her.

“I’ve found them,” she said in Kerch.  
Turning to Irina, the strange girl spoke again. “My name is Inej, and we’re here to help you. How many of you are down there?”  
“Four,” replied Irina. Inej signalled to one of her crew, and two of them went down into the hold, grimacing at the smell. Irina’s fingers flew to the talisman at her neck – one of Sankta Alina’s finger bones, which she didn’t believe was real, but had kept because Ana had given it to her. Now she rubbed it as if to remind herself that this was real, this was happening, she was being freed. Inej signalled to one of her crew, and two of them went down into the hold, grimacing at the smell.

A slow, shaky smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “You’re really going to help us?”

“I was a slave once too, and I swear by the Saints I’m here to help you,” Inej replied, smiling and offering Irina a hand to help her up. She took it gratefully, feeling the warm press of Inej’s hand against her own – a lifeline, to bring her out of this hell. Irina stood with shaky legs on the deck and breathed in the sea, allowing Inej to help her walk over a makeshift plank onto her own boat. She was taken down into a warm cabin, given a blanket, food and a place to sit, and for the first time in a long while, she felt safe.  
Inej explained as they went how she had been freed: Inej’s ship caught slavers and released their captives, and her crew had recognised the flag and known that the men aboard were wanted criminals. For around half a year, it had been like this: boarding slave-ships and trying to make some good in the world.

One of the other girls who had been down in the hold with her joined them eventually. One of them was Margareta, who spoke to Inej in quick, rapid, desperate Kerch, which Irina could only understand fleetingly. She’d only picked up some kind of understanding of Kerch from her time aboard the slavers’ ship, and this was too much for her to keep up with.  
After a while, Inej laughed and turned to Irina, speaking in Ravkan. “Margareta says that I speak Kerch like a criminal.”  
“Do you?” Irina asked. How could someone so kind be a criminal? Then she remembered the ease with which Inej had drawn those knives, and re-evaluated her.  
“Yes, I do,” said Inej, a happy, reminiscent smile on her face, and Margareta cast a confused look at Irina.

Then a crew member carried in the other girl and laid her down on a chair. After a few sips of tea, she opened her eyes and managed to introduce herself as Dakota before promptly falling asleep again. 

Irina was suddenly reminded of how tired she felt, of all the familiar aches returning to her in droves. She’d been so elated at her rescue that her hurts had melted away but now she wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep for several hours. 

It must have shown on her face, because Inej gave her a sympathetic glance and said, “If you’re tired, we have some bunks where you can lie down.”  
Margareta nodded enthusiastically, and they followed Inej to another room. Irina’s head was swimming, and she fell asleep as her head hit the pillow.

She dreamed of Kostya. He extended a hand to help her up; she couldn’t see him, but she knew it was him all the same.  
“Come into the light, Ree,” he called, using his pet name for her. She didn’t care whether his voice was real or not: the sound of it, familiar to her as living, made her heart split in two, made her want to burst into tears. “Come where it’s safe.”  
“Kostya,” she breathed.  
The dream shifted. She was running, the air being sucked from her lungs as she forced herself to go on – one foot in front of the other, her heartbeat pounding a frenzied rhythm. The entrance to the cave was so close that the watery light from outside was already grazing her skin, lining the path ahead of her. She knew somehow that once she was out of the deep darkness, she’d be safe.  
But Kostya was back there. She couldn’t help herself. She’d hesitated.  
And then she’d seen it: a long, skeletal beast with grey mottled skin, flapping huge leathery wings so that the reek of blood spread down the cavern. She caught the faint remnants of light glinting off its long, jagged rows of teeth and long, dirty claws.  
“Run, Irina!” Kostya shouted, and his voice seemed too far away for comfort. “I know what they are; I’ll hold them off.”  
“What are they?” she’d screamed, scrambling into the light. “Kostya, you might be Grisha, but these –“  
“Go!” he yelled, and Irina was jolted from the nightmare.

Shaking off the memory with a shudder, she opened her eyes. She could still smell the brine of the sea and feel the lull of a ship underneath her, and for a moment, she was seized with terror, afraid that she was stuck in the hold of a slaver’s ship again. Then she felt the coarseness of the blanket underneath her, and realised that her head felt clearer than it had in a long time; she took in a deep breath, and swung her legs over the side of the bunk.  
Air. She needed fresh air. 

She felt her way to the door in the dimness. It must be night outside; it had been late afternoon when they were rescued, and Irina didn’t think she’d slept more than a few hours. Fumbling, she swung the door open, and pushed her matted black hair from her face as she stepped outside.  
When she made it to the deck, she walked over to the prow and sat; the planks underneath her were still a little damp with rain, but she didn’t mind as she spread her already filthy dress over it and ran her fingers over the wood. She breathed in the air and looked at the dark expanse of the sky above, dotted here and there with stars, glinting as if the darkness was a velvet blanket and they were the only cracks that the iridescence on the other side could get through. Irina felt that if only she could get close enough, she could tear the darkness right out of the heavens, like pulling back a curtain, and reveal the brilliancy of the light beyond. 

She wondered if Kostya was looking up at the same moon. She wondered, too, if Anastasiya was looking at the same stars from Os Alta. She hoped so. It was one way they’d always be together, as they always had been until a few years ago: sisters, united against the world. Closing her eyes, she could picture Ana the last time she’d come home to visit: her Summoner’s bright blue kefta vibrant against her smooth terracotta skin and tawny, loose curls; the way her grin stretched across her face like a story unfolding. Irina smiled and was surprised to feel the wetness of tears soaking into her skin as she remembered how Ana had sent a flash of light through the room to dazzle Irina while their mother cursed them in Ravkan for knocking over a cup of tea. Ana had been otkazat’sya before a saint – the Sun Summoner, Alina Starkov – had performed a miracle and given Grisha light to so many ordinary people.

Anastasiya had always liked to summon when she saw Irina, holding her hand or a lock of her hair. You make everything easier, she’d said, and it was true, because Irina was an amplifier, a way of making people’s power stronger, even if she didn’t have any powers herself.  
She was so busy remembering that she didn’t hear the girl behind her. Or maybe it was just that nobody ever heard Inej coming.

“Irina, right?” The graceful girl folded her legs and sat next to Irina, smiling sadly.  
“That’s me,” replied Irina, reaching again for her Saint’s talisman. She rubbed her fingers against the familiar hardness of the bone.  
To her relief, Inej didn’t ask how she was feeling or if she would be alright. Irina didn’t think she could handle someone asking that, because the truth was that she had left “alright” behind a long, long time ago. She probably wouldn’t be anywhere near “alright” until she could see Anastasiya and her mother again.  
“What’s that?” Inej queried.  
“Saint’s finger bone.”  
Inej smiled. “I meant to ask, which one? Marya? Petyr? Sankta Lizabeta?”  
Irina drew the loop of thin string around her throat to dangle the talisman from her fingers, letting it sway in the lull of the ship. Moonlight reflected off its hard outlines, and on the longing gleam in her eyes. “Sankta Alina’s finger bone. My sister was near the Fold at the end of the civil war.”  
Inej’s face softened. Then she reached for one of her knives – Irina hadn’t even realised she still had them – and drew out a long, slender, bone-handled blade that shone wickedly. “This one’s Sankta Alina. I chose her because... She gave her life before she could even turn eighteen. Martyred to a cause greater than all of us. I think that’s beautiful.”  
Irina wondered why she named her blades, but instead asked, “Is that what you’re doing, freeing slaves? Devoting your life to something bigger?”  
“Yes, Saints help me,” said Inej, laughing lightly. She tucked Sankta Alina away and patted the hilts of her other knives. “I name all of my favourite blades after the Saints. I like to keep them close, to remind me of what’s really important.”  
Irina shrugged wordlessly, eyes on the water. What is really important? she wondered. Saints and a greater cause might be Inej’s purpose in life, but Irina didn’t know what her life was about. _All I want is Kostya, my family and a chance to sleep in peace,_ she decided, _and to never, ever see a slaver’s ship again._  
“Where are we going?” she blurted out suddenly. It seemed stupid not to ask. “I need to go to Ravka.”  
Inej nodded. “I’ll take you to Ravka. We’re going to Kerch first, though, to stock up on supplies. I have some people I want to meet in Ketterdam.”  
Irina tensed suddenly, narrowing her eyes to look at Inej. “Kerch? That’s where the slaver ship was taking us. They buy… people there.” She didn’t want to mention that she was an amplifier. It would only drive up her price, and make people more likely to buy her. Who didn’t want someone that could make their Grisha stronger, better, more efficient?  
She’d hoped to go to the Little Palace and beg for a place there with her sister, to plead her usefulness as an amplifier and hope to stay near the Grisha. Now, it seemed, her ability would be dangerous again.  
Inej’s eyes glinted, and she pursed her lips. “Nobody is selling you to anyone, if I can help it. I was fourteen when I was taken. They sold me to the Menagerie.”  
“The Menagerie?”  
“A brothel.”  
Irina shivered; this girl had probably seen awful things – had probably been forced to do awful things just to survive. “How did you get out? Did you save up?”  
Inej laughed darkly. “Indentures like the one I had are near impossible to pay your way out of on your own. No, someone got me out.”  
“Who?”  
“You might meet him when we go to Ketterdam.” There was something wistful, a kind of light that snuck its way into Inej’s tone, and Irina didn’t miss it.  
“How long will we be in Kerch?” Irina inquired. She knew she was probably annoying Inej, but she needed to know – or rather, she wanted to know how long it could be until she got back to Anastasiya.  
“A day, maybe two at most. Eager to get back to Ravka?”  
“Definitely. I’ve got a sister – and my mother…” Irina trailed off, feeling suddenly awkward. Inej seemed to notice and her mouth quirked to the side.  
“Your father?”  
“He was Suli. Madraya’s Ravkan, from near Poliznaya, but she moved to Os Kervo when she married.” She let the words hang in the air. Was. She didn’t feel like explaining that her father had died before she was old enough to know him.  
“Well, I can take you back to her if she’s in West Ravka; I’m going to Os Alta anyways. I’m visiting a friend.”  
“Really?” Irina was excited. Travelling would be so much easier with someone like Inej – capable, strong, with scars on her hands, a set of wicked knives, and an air about her that spoke of danger.  
“Why not?” Inej unfolded her legs, and pulling herself up like a puppet on invisible strings, rose. “I’ll see you in the morning, Irina… what’s your last name?”  
“Lebedev. Irina Lebedev.”  
“Well, it was nice to talk to you, Irina Lebedev.” Inej smiled as she spoke, and Irina had the strangest feeling that she actually meant the words, and wasn’t just saying them out of politeness. “Try and get some sleep. Ketterdam is a lot to take in.”  
＼

#### Him

In the darkness of a poorly lit Tsarbucks, he waited. He watched the Kerch laugh and gossip from the table where he sat wreathed in shadows, and they didn’t know it, but he hung on their every word. When someone looked over at his table, all they saw was an oddly elegant dark-haired young man, no more than seventeen, nursing a cup of coffee – they didn’t have much in the way of tea in Ketterdam – but nobody menacing, although nobody approached him.  
When the time was right, and he had heard all that he needed to know, he began to plan.  
And then he began to act.  
_You and I will change the world._  
＼

#### Irina

“Are you coming, or not?” Inej called over her shoulder, laughing; Irina and Margareta struggled to keep up, but they were grinning as Inej led them through the packed streets of Fifth Harbour. People here were dressed in strange mercher’s black or odd, bizarrely bright and flashy colours, along with the tourists in their own motley of clothes. A cacophony of sounds rang out from across the decks: people advertising their wares, yelling about the best taverns, the finest hotels. Did you hear that? Ten whole kruge a night! We have you beat, with luxury rooms for only five kruge. Who could turn down an offer like that? The air was ripe with a thick smell – something between decay and stale things that made Irina wrinkle her nose, while Margareta smiled and took in a deep breath.

“Ah,” Margareta groaned, “the wonderful smell of home.”  
Irina raised an eyebrow. “It smells like old soup.”  
“Exactly. Home.”  
Inej, who had doubled back to walk with them, a hand on her knives, smiled broadly. “You get accustomed to the smell.”  
“Hopefully I won’t have to stay here long enough for that to happen,” said Irina.  
She almost missed it: the hand, snake-quick, that reached towards her Saint’s talisman from behind. Inej stopped it by wrapping her own hand around the thief’s wrist and frowning. She gave him a harsh shove backwards and a cuff to the jaw, and the scruffy-haired youth grunted and rubbed his wrist. Irina caught the flash of a tattoo, stark against his skin, as he looked up at her ruefully.

“Ghezen, Ghafa,” he moaned. “That was harsh.”  
“You’d steal from her? She has nothing left. Go pick on some better pigeons, or I’ll report you to Kaz.”  
The boy paled. “Sorry, Wraith,” he muttered, and slipped away into the crowd.

Margareta turned on Inej, eyes wide. “Kaz? As in, Kaz Brekker?” She let out a nervous, high laugh. “And you’re the… he called you the Wraith?”  
Inej only dipped her head in a half-salute. “At your service.”  
“Ghezen! The last time I was in Kerch, your faces were on half the posters in the city.”  
Inej’s brow furrowed a little as she led them off the docks and into a series of winding streets. “I’m glad that’s behind us. You sound like you lived in Ketterdam. Do you have somewhere safe to go?”  
Margareta nodded, blonde hair blending into the clean clothes Inej had given her. “My brother lives near the Zelver district.”  
Inej whistled. “Fancy.”  
Margareta shook her head, a wry smile coming over her lips. “He wants to be a mercher. I’ve told him he’s better off moving to Novyi Zem and becoming a jurda farmer.”  
“Wasn’t there some kind of scandal over jurda a while ago? Jurda parem?” Irina asked. She’d been in Ravka, but people had been buzzing with the news of the revolutionary, dangerous drug which could extend and heighten Grisha power to a dangerous level. It sounded too much like merzost for her own liking.  
She glanced at Inej. The Wraith was smiling grimly, as if laughing at a joke only she could hear. “You could say that.”  
“Oh, I recognise where we are now,” exclaimed Margareta. “I can find my way home from here.”  
“Good luck,” Inej said. “I hope I never have to rescue you again.”  
“Thanks, I think,” laughed Margareta. “Goodbye, Irina. I won’t say that I enjoyed being stuck in a slaver’s ship with you, but I wish you well for the future. May Ghezen be with you both.” 

Irina was oddly touched, even though she didn’t believe in Kerch gods, especially ones that only cared about money. “Thanks, Margareta.”  
Once Margareta had disappeared, swallowed into the crowd, Irina let out a long exhalation. She was alone with Inej now, and the idea of wandering the streets of a strange city with someone she barely knew didn’t seem so daunting now that she knew she would be able to get back to Ravka, to home and family and safety.  
“I hate goodbyes,” she said as they walked over cobbled tiles, under a makeshift arch, through a broad alley that she hadn’t seen a moment before. She could see canals glinting in the distance. Inej seemed to know every corner of the city as if it were etched in her mind.  
“There’s something my father taught me,” said Inej. “A Suli proverb. Saying goodbye is like saying goodnight. When it stings, all you have to do is hope for the morning.”  
Irina blinked. “That’s… kind of beautiful.” It made her think of her father, and wonder if he’d known that proverb before he’d died. It made her think, too, of her sister, who didn’t need a dawn, because she could summon all the light she wanted.  
Also, it kind of didn't make any sense.

They emerged onto a new street, and Irina gasped at what she saw.  
“I thought you’d like to see this,” said Inej, spreading an arm to encompass their surroundings. 

It looked like Ravka; people wore traditional clothing, milling around beside stalls that sold blini and her favourite foods and drink. It could have been the market city outside Os Alta, if not for the looming Ketterdam buildings in the background. Outside comfortable-looking cafes, old men read Ravkan newssheets, their eyes skimming over stories weeks out of date; she could hear a balalaika being played from somewhere in the distance, and stalls even sold painted portraits of Saints and King Nikolai Lantsov.  
Inej grimaced as she passed one. “King Nikolai looks nothing like that.”

“You’ve met him?” 

“Briefly.”

Irina gaped, awed, and not only that, but possibility swirled in her brain. If Inej knew King Nikolai, perhaps she could help convince the young king to let her stay at the Little Palace with her sister, even if she wasn’t really Grisha. She barely dared to hope for it, but maybe it meant they could help Kostya, too.

“In here,” Inej motioned, waving her hand at a little café on the corner with large windows. Irina followed Inej’s lead and ducked inside.  
The room was bathed in midday light from the world outside, illuminating the low, brightly painted wooden tables pushed up against the patterned wallpaper. It was mostly empty, apart from an old woman wearing a sarafan in the corner, reading a newssheet, and a couple of teenage boys lounging in the sunlight by a window. One, Kerch, drank coffee. The other, long-limbed and Zemeni, decked out in notoriously flashy clothes, appeared to be toying with a gun.

“Inej! Over here!” The boy waved his gun wildly, grinning. The red-haired Kerch next to him looked vaguely concerned.  
“Put that thing down, Jesper. We wouldn’t want you to shoot the roof off.”  
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Jesper, but he did put the gun down after a glance at his companion. “It’s always more fun when you shoot things. Especially roofs. Did you know I invented the term ‘raising the roof?’”  
Inej rolled her eyes, but she was beaming when she walked over to them. “Hey, Wylan. Hello, Jesper. Please put that gun away.”  
Feeling more than a little nervous, Irina followed, and slunk into the seat next to Inej when Inej nodded.  
“It’s okay,” she assured Irina. “They don’t bite.”  
Jesper snorted.  
“Most of the time,” Inej corrected herself. “Irina, meet Jesper and Wylan. Wylan and Jesper, meet Irina Lebedev.”  
“Hey, Irina,” said the flame-haired Kerch, smiling a little meekly.  
“Welcome to Ketterdam,” Jesper grinned broadly, flashing long, straight, pearly white teeth, free of jurda. “How do you like our humble city so far?”  
“It smells,” Irina stated honestly, and Wylan’s face cracked into a proper smile. He slung an arm around Jesper.  
Winking, Jesper said, “There are some things that make it bearable, though, if you know what I mean.”  
“Oh, shut up, you two,” said Inej, rolling her eyes. She ordered coffee for herself, and despite Irina’s insistence that she didn’t need to buy anything for her, a plate of blini for Irina.

“Ravkans always like blini,” said Jesper, reaching over and stealing some from her plate. “Blini and herring.”  
“Did Nina teach you that?” asked Wylan, who was still holding onto his almost-empty cup of coffee with one hand. His fingers drummed out a tune on the table.  
“Yes. And she taught me that everyone likes waffles.” Jesper looked away from Wylan – which seemed difficult for him – and raised an eyebrow at Irina. “You probably like herring and waffles too, right?”  
“Not at the same time,” admitted Irina. “But sure.”  
“Good. We have plenty back at the house. You can have herring and waffles, not at the same time, for dinner,” concluded Wylan.  
“At the house?” Irina sputtered.  
“When I free people, and we come to Ketterdam, sometimes Wylan and Jesper let them stay there for a while if they’ve got nowhere else to go,” explained Inej. “You can stay there tonight, if you like. It’s much nicer than the ship.”  
“Yeah, Wylan’s house is huge. Mercher money,” agreed Jesper.  
“Don’t your parents mind?” asked Irina. She knew she had asked the wrong thing when a shadow flitted over Wylan’s face, there and gone in a heartbeat. Inwardly, she cursed herself.  
“His dad would probably mind, but it’s not like he can do anything about it,” said Jesper a shade too brightly. Wylan shrugged. “Wylan’s dad is Jan Van Eck. He’s in prison.”  
The name seemed to ring a bell in Irina’s head, but she couldn’t place a finger on why. “For what?”  
“Fraud, deceit, subverting the market…” Inej shrugged.  
“And trying to kill his son,” added Jesper helpfully.  
“Oh,” said Irina, not knowing what else to say. She tried to change the subject. “So, what do you people do? Inej frees slaves, so what about you?”  
“Wylan plays a mean flute,” said Jesper. “I try not to get into debt.”  
Inej rolled her eyes. “Jesper plays the markets, with Wylan’s help. They run his family house.”  
Not as heroic or inspiring as Inej’s tale, Irina thought, but that didn’t mean it didn’t sound like a pretty good life.  
“We should get back soon,” said Wylan, glancing at his watch. “Kaz might stop by today.”  
“He told you he was stopping by?” Inej asked incredulously. “As in, he let you know? Kaz Brekker told you his plans?”  
“No,” said Wylan, smiling faintly. “It’s just that when you sent that messenger to us, telling us to meet you here, I might have let it slip around the Barrel that you’d be back today.”  
“Oh, Wylan,” sighed Inej, but she was blushing.  
“Is this the same Kaz that Margareta was so afraid of?” asked Irina.  
“Probably,” said Wylan. “Everyone’s afraid of Kaz. The names they have for him –“  
“Dirtyhands! Bastard of the Barrel! Murderer! Thief! Conman!” Jesper mocked fainting dramatically.  
“Well he’s certainly no Saint,” said Inej, rolling her eyes.  
“And he’s coming to meet you? Why?” queried Irina nervously. It would be ironic if she’d escaped slavery only to be caught up in something to do with murderers and conmen. She did not like the sound of those nicknames at all.  
Jesper scoffed. “Because he won’t admit it, but he’s one of our best friends.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you like it! it has come to my attention that some people haven're read the grisha trilogy, but just in case you haven't here's a summary of the important points included in this fic:
> 
> (SPOILER ALERT FOR TGT)
> 
> \- i think it's covered in the soc duology but basically, a few years ago in ravka, there was a civil war. on the losing side was the bad guy, the Darkling, also known as Aleksander Morozova, and he was the only grisha (apart from his mother, baghra morozova, who dies in canon) who could manipulate darkness. he ruled the second army for a while.   
> \- on the winning side was alina starkov the sun summoner. she was an orphan who didnt discover her powers until she was seventeen. she believed she loved the darkling, (aka darkles sparkles by the fandom), but he tricked her and in the end she killed him by giving up her powers and then stabbing him. she went to live with her childhood love, malyen oretsev, who was not grisha and wanted her to be ~normal~. she ended up in the orphanage again, looking after little kids.   
> \- nikolai lantsov aka sturmhond aka king nikolai: a sweet cute cunning baby who also loved alina  
> \- the triumvirate is pretty much explained in ck but its the 3 main grisha who help rule  
> let me know if i've missed anything out/don't explain well enough. i'll add more notes to chapters


	2. Gaslight, Sunlight, No Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was a girl there, small, white-haired, a girl who didn’t feel she was a girl any longer.  
> There was a boy there, with eyes like storm-clouds and a heart like ground glass under his skin, a boy who had decided to wait no longer. 
> 
> And there was a secret.
> 
> -  
> also kanej fluff (kind of)

#### Inej

The moon was starting to rise over the crooked streets of Ketterdam as Inej slipped out of Wylan’s house, her breath leaving her mouth in cold grey puffs of air. Ketterdam was unnecessarily cold and muggy, she thought, slipping through the city to where she knew he’d be waiting for her. He hadn’t come to the house, and she was glad that Irina didn’t have to meet him; Irina seemed so frail and untrustworthy of everything, just like most of the saved slaves. Kaz would probably shatter the little confidence that she’d been regaining over the past few days. Inej thanked the Saints that Irina was probably eating herring with Jesper right now, listening to Wylan play the flute, comfortable in the luxury of the mercher’s mansion. It had to be an upgrade from the slaver’s ship, anyway. She knew that well enough herself.

The lights reflecting in the murky canal waters were yellow as she stepped over them, reflecting the artificial brightness that shone from the windows of the Crow Club, and Inej felt the familiarity wash over her as she looked up at the red-and-black façade. Barkers were out, and some of the ones she was friendly with acknowledged her with a nod or a grin, a wave or a yell, before they went back to the sacred cause of drawing money out from pigeons’ pockets. She was glad she wasn’t one of them. They must have been sodden and freezing in the unpleasant weather, but then again, nothing motivated the Kerch like money.

She saw him then, leaning on his cane, looking out at one of the canals. Silently – which wasn’t hard in the raucous noise from the Barrel – she wove her way towards him.  
Kaz was dressed in mocking mercher black as he always was, and the bright lights reflected in his vest as she got closer. She could see bruises on his jaw, probably from a recent fight; his hard lines and angles were somewhat softened by the hazy fog and the glint of moonlight, but she could see underneath that, all of the raw harshness and the determination. Sometimes she wondered if he was worth fighting for at all, but then she looked at him and thought, if the heart is an arrow, he is my aim. Whether I want it or not.  
At least, she noted, he drew his gloves off when she approached. He didn’t go so far as to turn to acknowledge her, but dipped his head a little.

Progress.

“What business, Brekker?” she asked mockingly. 

The corner of Kaz’s mouth tilted up slightly. “Everything’s business, Inej. You can make profit out of anything.”  
He didn’t ask her how her journey had gone or how she was – Kaz didn’t talk like that, not with her. He could read her by now. He could probably tell how her last two weeks had been without even looking at her. But he did now, and his eyes shone black in the somehow sombre light.

“And don’t you know it,” she replied lightly. Then she reached out and gently, tenderly, took his arm. He didn’t flinch or walk away.  
More progress. This is what you’re fighting for, Inej.  
“Have you heard any new dirt lately?” His voice was a rasp.  
“Not much. There were rumours about Ravka again, but then there are always rumours about Ravka.”  
“Heard anything about a Darkling?”  
Inej’s brow furrowed. “No, why?”

Kaz cast a lazy glance around, as if to make sure nobody was listening. “People in Kerch are saying there’s someone new who can summon darkness, and it could just be a bunch of stick, because there are rumours like that all the time, aren’t there?”

“There’ve been rumours like that since the Ravkan civil war,” replied Inej, forehead creasing. People were scared and sometimes saw things that weren’t there, or were too ready to believe made-up stories. “So what makes this any different?”

“Rumour is that this one was selling jurda parem.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Inej asked, as they started to walk further away from East Stave. Kaz had one hand gripping his cane tightly with pale while lock pick’s fingers, and the other was occupied as he held his arm out for her.  
He never usually told her anything without a reason. Everything he did came with a hundred strings attached. Sometimes they were invisible, sometimes they were glaringly obvious, but they all tangled together enough to make a net.

“A favour,” said Kaz, and she was going to question him some more before she remembered that he’d found her family and bought her a ship as a favour.  
No strings attached.

“Thanks. Maybe my Saints are getting to you.” She nudged him.  
“Ghezen forbid.”  
“You can’t swear on Ghezen. You don’t believe in him.”  
“I believe in what he stands for.”  
“A sacred mercher life? Fair trade?”

“I believe in most of what he stands for,” Kaz corrected himself. “Profit. Investments. Cold, hard kruge.”  
Inej rolled her eyes. “You and your investments.”  
“I’d say most of them are pretty wise.”  
Inej laughed, and since she was holding onto his arm, she felt the moment Kaz’s breathing hitched as he looked at her. Heat threatened to flush her cheeks, and she looked down at the ground, still smiling.

“For example,” Kaz went on, “Fifth Harbour. That was a good one. Or Wylan Van Eck. Now I have rich mercher connections. And, of course –“  
“You’re missing out the most important one,” Inej said. She tilted her head to the side. Kaz’s gaze fixed on a lock of hair that had somehow escaped her braid. His fingers twitched on his cane, as if he were itching to push it back, but something restrained him.  
“I already said Fifth Harbour.”  
“What about me?”

Kaz slowed walking, and she thought that he looked beautiful in the weird mix of moonlight and gaslight, far away enough from the vibrancy of East Stave that the people’s clamour had shrunk to a whisper. Now the only music that filled the air was the sound of the canal trickling slowly along, the exhalations of their breath, the clatter of Kaz’s cane on the pavement. His face was made sharper in the harsh lighting – there was no fog here – but she embraced it because she knew it was raw. It was real. It was him. Kaz Brekker looked at her in a way that still gave her hope for who he could become – a better person. Because she could see his walls crumbling and his armour slowly peeling away, bit by bit, every time he turned his onyx eyes on her.

“Inej, though you’ve made me more than enough money,” he declared, “you were never just an indenture.”  
“What was I, then?”  
He turned away. “Something different.”  
“Different? Like a new type of drink at the Crow Club? A slight change in the shade of black you wear? A hat in a different style?”

Kaz sighed. He said the words like a confession. “No, Inej, my Suli Saint. Something more.”

＼

#### Him

Their faces were hopeful, broken.  
He felt disgusted.  
It wasn’t right that something as lowly as a drug – jurda parem – could reduce powerful Grisha to this state. All they wanted was more of the drug; they cried out for it in their sleep, tearing at their own skin. But when he saw how it overtook them, even though his lip curled, he couldn’t help but think of the pull of merzost.  
More than that, too. Of the pull of her.  
And he understood them a little better, because he knew what it was to hunger relentlessly for things that you knew you couldn’t have. He knew what it was to yearn for something that would only mean your own destruction. For something that would turn you from something eternal and enduring into a match: lit up in a violent flare of light, in the vibrant pain and passion of living, and then gone in the next moment.  
That was Grisha after jurda parem. That was Alina, choosing the brief sunshine of an otkazat’sya life over the eternity of power and life. That was him, aching for merzost, waking up from nightmares in which he chased Alina, in which she stabbed that knife into him and then cried over his dying body like her heart was breaking. Because she was like that to him. He’d never felt anything more real, anything brighter than when he was around her. And if she’d had it her way, his life would have already been snuffed out.  
Ashes and decimation.  
But he always had his way. And he was not a short-lived match, there and gone, but a force to be reckoned with.  
The sun was low and round in the sky outside, but soon, Ravka would fall under the shadow of an eclipse.  
＼

#### Irina

“I’ve decided something,” Irina stated matter-of-factly as Inej led her to the harbour the next day. She had a cloth pressed over her nose to attempt to stifle the awful stench of the city, pointedly ignoring the fact that the cloth smelled just like Ketterdam, too.

“What is it?” Inej asked, signalling to one of her crew members to bring some kind of crate onto the ship. 

“This is the worst-smelling place I’ve ever been in my life.” _Apart from that cave where I left Kostya, but I’m not going to tell you that._  
Don’t think about Kostya. Just get back to Ravka, to the Little Palace, and you can find him.  
Inej laughed, and walked up the gangplank, her steps light and catlike as always, dark hair glinting in the early morning light. “You’ll be out at sea in less than an hour. You won’t have to worry about bad smells then.”  
“Thank the Saints,” muttered Irina. 

A gust of wind blew her cloth right out of her hand, and the smell of fish and old soup hit her again like a sack of bricks. Cursing, she scrabbled around on the floor for it, then finally giving up when it blew away back towards the dark canals of Ketterdam. She wouldn’t need it for the voyage ahead, anyway. 

She straightened up, ready to follow Inej, and promptly careened into someone. She was thrown back by the force and landed sitting on the ground.  
“Sankt Ilya!” cried the stranger, and her first thought was that he must be Ravkan. That was followed by embarrassment and then the realisation that she’d just flown right into a very handsome young man, a little older than her, his dark hair wind-mussed and his cheeks tinged red by the chill. 

Then she noted that he wasn’t scowling angrily, but rather looked crestfallen and miserable.  
“I’m so sorry,” Irina gasped in stuttering Kerch. “Are you alright?”  
The stranger looked at her oddly. He said something in perfect, quick Kerch that she couldn’t understand, and she frowned. 

“I don’t understand,” she said in Ravkan, and the boy switched languages with ease.  
“You’re the one on the ground, yet you apologise to me?” His mouth quirked to the side.  
“I bumped into you first. Please forgive me. I hope you’re alright.”  
The boy held out a hand. “Really, our collision did not affect me in the slightest. However, I don’t believe I am alright.”

She took his hand; it was gloved, but she appreciated the heat that he lent her. His eyes narrowed a little as he helped her to her feet, as if he were thinking something over.  
“Why aren’t you alright? Is it the city? It smells awful, I know. I’m glad I get to leave,” said Irina, crossing her arms against the cold. Her skirt was wet now, but she knew Inej wouldn’t mind. “I really should go now. I’m sorry.”  
“You’re lucky you get to leave,” said the boy wistfully. “I’ve been saving up to go back to Ravka for two years now and the boat just left without me.”  
“Oh,” said Irina, not knowing what to say. 

“Irina Lebedev, come on!” yelled Inej from where she stood aboard the ship. When she saw Irina standing there with the strange boy, she swung her legs over the side, landing neatly on the gangplank, and was by her side in a few seconds. “Who’s your friend?”

Irina gave the boy a pointed look.  
“I’m Eryk.” He smiled uncomfortably, as if intimidated by Inej’s presence. Irina felt a wash of sympathy come over her for him – he’d just been stranded, and now there was a fierce girl with a set of knives standing in front of him, demanding his name.  
“I just knocked into him, and I was apologising,” offered Irina. Inej’s gaze softened when she cast her eyes over him.  
“You look like you’ve seen better days,” she commented. 

Eryk shrugged and dug his hands in his pockets; she noticed that they were stained with the familiar bright orange of jurda, colouring the tips of his fingers lightly. “Saved up for passage to Ravka for two years, and now the boat just left without me.”  
Inej blew through her teeth. “That’s harsh. How’d you end up in Ketterdam?”  
“I came here to escape the Ravkan civil war a few years ago. My family died in it, but my…” He swallowed. “My girl’s still there, and I was so close to seeing her again. Now I’ll have to start from the bottom again.”

“Hey,” said Inej. She put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll take you to Ravka.”  
“I don’t have any money –“  
Inej rolled her eyes. “We’re not Kerch; it’s my ship. I’ll take you for free.”  
“Really?” The tone of hope, forbidden hope, that wove its way through Eryk’s voice made Irina’s heart ache. She recognised that feeling from when she’d been rescued from the hold of a slave ship; she’d felt the wonderful, terrible emotion that came when you thought you’d lost everything, but that there was still a chance for redemption.  
This is what Inej does, she realised. She brings people hope. On an impulse, she threw her arms around the small, slender girl, hugging her tightly for a second.  
Inej laughed a little nervously. 

“I’m sorry,” mumbled Irina, drawing away. “It’s just… You’re such a good person. You remind me of my Madraya.”  
Was it just her, or did Eryk’s face tighten slightly at the mention of her mother? Stupid, Irina cursed herself, realising her mistake. He’d just told them that his family was dead, and now here she was, rubbing it in his face. 

She looked down as she boarded the ship. And so neither she nor Inej saw Eryk’s head lift slightly, a triumphant smile curling across his lips for half a second, his hair ruffled by a dark, invisible wind. But they felt the shadow passing over the sun, casting everything in grey.

Irina shivered. 

＼

#### Inej

Inej stood at the stern of the boat, the wind rippling through her dark hair – which was, for once, unbound. It felt strange and new, but then so did everything these days.  
She’d had this ship for half a year, but she kept finding and learning new things about it. It was like a never-ending adventure, a discovery of both the seas and herself, and it was better than she possibly could have ever dreamed. 

Dakota and Irina were seated next to each other next to a stack of crates, sipping tea that sloshed precariously in their cups; Inej could see that much from here. She wondered what they were talking about: the future, the past, however long they’d spent in the hold of that ship. Pride, blossoming and sweet, unfurled in her chest when she saw how the colour and life had returned to their cheeks. They were dressed in clean clothes that Inej had bought herself, half price, from a hunched old lady in the Barrel. Her crew darted around them occasionally, calling out to each other, stopping to talk to them, joking and jostling. 

They were headed to Ravka. She’d see Nina again, and even her high-ranking Grisha friends in the Triumvirate: Zoya Nazyalensky, Genya Safin, and David Kostyk, all of whom had known a real Saint. Sankta Alina. Inej drew out the blade, examining its smooth pallor. What would it be like, she wondered, to be blessed with some divine purpose, to know that you had a higher calling? What would Alina have been like? What was going through her head in the last moments before she was martyred?

Inej supposed she would never know, but that didn’t matter. She didn’t need a mandate from above in order to do good in the world. The world was harsh, and it owed her nothing, but she would give and take as she and her Saints saw fit. 

“Lost in thought?” She hadn’t heard him coming, which surprised her, because usually Inej was aware of every movement and noise. Eryk, the Ravkan boy she’d offered to take with her earlier, probably around Kaz’s age, stood next to her. His dark hair blew across his face and she was reminded oddly again of Kaz. It was something in the eyes. She felt, too, that she’d seen his face before somewhere, but she couldn’t place her finger on it.

“You could say that,” admitted Inej. She slid the knife back into its sheath, glancing back at the rest of the crew. None of them seemed to notice that Eryk was there.  
“What were you thinking about?” Eryk asked.  
“I have a friend in Ravka I’m visiting. I haven’t seen her in a while, and I hope she’s holding up well.”  
“Who?”  
“A Grisha. She lost someone close to her a little while ago – sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this.”  
Eryk’s eyebrows lifted. “No, it’s fine. Go on.”  
“I worry about her because she has such a stressful job, and the last year and a half hasn’t been too good to her. Jurda parem –“  
“Your friend takes jurda parem?” Eryk’s eyes narrowed. 

Inej felt suddenly suspicious. “She… couldn’t help it. She was lucky to survive.” Glancing up at Eryk, she felt a sudden rush of realisation come over her. If Eryk was that worried about the drug… “You’re Grisha.”  
His face scrunched up. “I wish I was, but I’m just an amplifier. I have yet to see whether I have any Grisha power.”  
Inej had been so sure… But looking at him now, she was convinced that he told the truth. She was experienced at rooting out the tells that gave away people’s lies: a tenseness in their tone, darting eyes, and he displayed none of these. He was either telling the truth, or a very, very good actor. Still, she prodded on. “What’s jurda parem to you, then?”  
His eyes took on a distant glaze, and the tiniest line appeared between his eyebrows. “My girl is Grisha. If someone made her take it, I don’t know what I’d do.” He glanced at Inej. “Your friend survived? With no consequences?”  
He asked too many questions, she thought, but she answered all the same. “She lived, but she had to go through a lot. Withdrawals, pain, cravings. And her power was never the same again. She was a Corporalki, a Heartrender. She could control the living. But now she can reawaken the dead.”  
Eryk turned away, and Inej thought it was because he was troubled by her words. Probably imagining his girl stripped of her powers, writhing against the pain of jurda parem.  
“I’m sorry,” Inej said. She’d gone too far. “Really, it’s not that bad.”  
“I’ll be alright,” said Eryk. 

She did not see the hungry, calculating gleam in his eyes.  
＼

#### Alina

Deep in Ravka, near Dva Stolba where Saints were said to be born and raised, there was an orphanage. It was a pretty, ordinary place, surrounded by lush forests where the children could learn hunting and trapping and run barefoot amidst the flowers; there were fussy math teachers and blossoms in cups of tea. 

There was a girl there, small, white-haired, a girl who didn’t feel she was a girl any longer. When she looked into her husband’s blue eyes, she felt love, but she also felt a longing and an ache for something she would never have again. 

The girl and the boy had grown up, but Alina felt she was growing apart from him. She had given up everything – everything – to be with him; so many men had offered her crowns, and she had still chosen him. And he hadn’t been happy until she had to give up the thing she loved most about herself, the thing that made her unique and special and made her come alive.

The Darkling had wanted her for her power – he had wanted an equal to rule with him. He’d waited out centuries of darkness and pain, never finding his balance, until her. And she had killed him. 

Nikolai Lantsov… She’d thought that he only wanted her, too, for a political alliance and because of her power. But when she’d lost everything that she was, all that power, all that light, he’d still asked her. 

And she’d said no.  
For Malyen. 

She twisted the Lantsov ring around her finger, and at that moment, a ray of sunlight hit it, lighting up the glittering emerald as if to say, look at everything you’ve lost. This is what you gave up for him.

Because the truth was that Mal couldn’t love anyone he thought was better, more powerful, than him.

_Stop it, Alina. This was what you chose. You chose Mal._

She turned away from the window, exhaled through her nose, and began to paint.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> double points if you recognise the name eryk, triple points if you can see where this is going. quadruple points if you've actually bothered to read this utter mess. darkles is so dramatic. i still hate mal. nikolai is coming next chapter!!


	3. Unforgiving Waters; The King's Scars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the first version, Persephone  
> is taken from her mother  
> and the goddess of the earth  
> punishes the earth—this is  
> consistent with what we know of human behavior,
> 
> that human beings take profound satisfaction  
> in doing harm, particularly  
> unconscious harm:
> 
> we may call this  
> negative creation.
> 
> \- Louise Glück, Persephone the Wanderer
> 
> \---  
> poor nikolai can't catch a break. neither can alina, apparently, but mal is doing just fine.

#### Irina

Irina’s hands were still fastened around her cup of tea, which had long since been emptied, when the first alarm came. The crew ran to their positions, faces grim and weary, as if they’d done this a thousand times before, but they still didn’t look forward to it. 

“Slavers!” The cry came from someone perched high above in the crow’s nest, and sure enough, if Irina squinted, she could make out the flag of a ship in the distance; the emblem, she realised with a chill, was the same that had been on the ship she’d been stuck on with Dakota. Next to her, the mahogany-skinned Zemeni girl froze with horror.   
“Get inside,” Inej called to them. Her face was cool, her expression blank. “We’ll deal with this.”  
“Wait!” yelled Irina, scrabbling to run to Inej. “I can help!”   
“Irina, you got out only a couple of days ago –“

“Do you have Grisha with you?” Irina knew she must seem crazy, but she had to try.  
Inej looked around. “Aline and Hans, Tidemaker and Squaller,” she said hurriedly. “Why? We’ll be fine, don’t worry. We’ve jumped bigger ships than this before.”  
“No, Inej, I…” Irina forced herself to say the words. “I’m an amplifier. Who’ll need more help?”

Inej’s eyes widened slightly, and she muttered something under her breath to herself before gesturing to the Tidemaker – Aline – and drawing her knives, running to the side of the boat.

“Get Eryk, too, if he wants,” Inej called over her shoulder. “He’s like you.”

_He’s like you._

Irina had never met another amplifier.

She didn’t have time to think about it as she reached the chestnut-haired Tidemaker, rushing up to support her the way she supported Ana. Her sister was Etherealki too, a Summoner, so it couldn’t be too different, right? 

“I’m an amplifier,” she told Aline hurriedly. The Tidemaker had been about to cast her off, but at the first moment that Irina clamped her hand around Aline’s wrist, she stopped and nodded in thanks. 

Never before had Irina seen a Grisha, apart from her sister, summoning with an amplifier. The result was devastating. Shark-swift waves bore them on quick currents towards the other boat; she could see men on deck, all armed with heavy-looking guns. The slave traders were an eclectic mix of Kaelish, Kerch, and Fjerdan, with one or two Shu Han. Irina gulped in fear when she saw the guns they had: Zemeni repeating rifles. 

They fired on Inej’s ship. The bullets were lost, swept away by a quick burst of Squaller wind, and across the deck, she saw Eryk, face determined, gripping onto Hans’ arm, helping him to direct wind currents that filled the sails and even knocked over some of the slavers on deck.   
Ropes unfurled in a flurry. A makeshift gangplank was thrown across between the two decks, and someone threw an anchor over the other ship so that it couldn’t move. It was terrifying and thrilling to watch Inej’s crew leap across, yelling and slicing, some with guns of their own, taking down the slavers quickly. A strike here, a blow there.   
The sun seemed to shine brighter in the sky, dripping heat onto everyone’s sweat-beaded faces. The tang of blood filled the air, and Irina looked away, back at Aline. Her face was glowing with Grisha power but her jaw was gritted with the exertion of controlling the waves. 

Then the pressure in the air dropped, and Irina saw Eryk swing from his place next to Hans, grab someone’s discarded knife, and plunge into the fray.  
He was even more adept than Inej. People seemed to die even before his blades reached them; he moved like a thunderclap, like a storm, like he lived and breathed through the clashing of blades. Without missing a beat, he snatched a gun up from the floor.

A minute and a half. That was how much longer the fighting lasted once Eryk had hold of a gun. 

Smoke and gunpowder pervaded the atmosphere, and blood pooled, dark and sombre against ship planks. Inej was already leading a group of slaves off the ship and into one of the cabins on the ship, explaining to them how they’d been saved; Irina saw Eryk go in and emerge carrying two more, one slung over each shoulder.   
“The rest are dead,” she heard him call to someone. Her stomach twisted. 

“Thanks, Irina,” Aline said.   
Irina shrugged. “Do you still need my help?”  
“I’ll be good from here on.”

Irina nodded and stepped aside, and while she was glad she’d found a way to help, she couldn’t stop resenting herself. She might be an amplifier, but she was useless on her own. Eryk was an amplifier, too, and she hadn’t seen him use any Grisha power, but he was like her. Except he wasn’t useless in a fight. Except he actually knew how to use a gun and a knife, and he’d helped end the battle before it had even really begun.  
He jogged over to her now, wiping blood from a blade with a filthy rag. He tossed it over his shoulder, and he smiled, but it was more of a grimace. 

“Eryk,” she said. “I didn’t know you could fight.”  
“I needed to learn how,” he said. “Amplifiers are rare, and in a place like Kerch, you need to know how to defend yourself.”  
Irina didn’t question this, but she was pretty sure that what Eryk had done was beyond self-defence. He had looked like a real soldier out there, slashing through the ranks, sending bullets through the air like vicious shooting stars. 

“So there are two of us,” he continued. He looked her over. “I haven’t met many amplifiers before.”  
“I haven’t seen any other amplifier before. Ever,” Irina admitted.  
“Haven’t you ever met any other Grisha with them?” He sounded surprised.   
“I don’t see a lot of Grisha. Just my sister, Ana.”

They walked together across the dock, Eryk handing his blades and gun to a crew member, smoothing down his shirt. Irina rebraided her matted tawny curls, combing through them with her fingers.   
“I’m guessing you didn’t go to the Little Palace. Who trained you, then?”  
Irina was startled. “I… I’m not Grisha.”   
He laughed. It didn’t have much humour in it. “Yes, you are, Irina Lebedev. I can see it written all over you as clearly as if someone painted the word ‘Grisha’ on your forehead. Besides, didn’t you say your sister was Grisha?”

He sat on an overturned crate, and Irina took the one opposite him, feeling self-conscious. “Sort of. She was in Kribirsk when Sankta Alina died, and she’s been able to summon a little light ever since.” Irina’s hands went to the familiar finger bone. Sankta Alina, Sol Koroleva.   
“A little?”   
“Most of the otkazat’sya who were there lost the ability over time, but she kept most of it. She’s better at it when I’m around.”  
“Because you’re an amplifier.”  
“But not Grisha.”  
“Why are you so sure of that?” Eryk crossed his arms, smiling. There was something about that smile that Irina didn’t like. It said, I know something you don’t, and she was sick of feeling that way. Forgotten. Clueless.   
“I’m fifteen. My power would have shown itself by now.”   
He shook his head, and Irina was fascinated by the dark flow and ripple of it. “Sometimes it takes Grisha years. Your Sankta Alina? She didn’t show her power until she was seventeen.”  
Irina laughed a little. Was he comparing her to Alina Starkov? “She was a Saint. Maybe it’s different with them.”  
She wasn’t so sure she wanted to be grouped with Sankta Alina anyway. She’d died before eighteen, and Irina intended to live a long, happy life.   
“Have you ever been tested?”  
“By a Grisha examiner? No.”

He grinned then, and it was so different from his previous sly smiles that she stared at it, a little unnerved. “I’m an amplifier too. Give me your wrist.”  
Cautiously, she held it out to him, wincing at the thinness and frailness of it. Irina felt like a skeleton, starved out from hollow days in the slaver’s ship. A little of her had died down there. 

But that was forgotten when his pale, thin fingers wrapped around her wrist; she let out a gasp at the shocking rush of surety that flowed through her. And deep down, something stirred in her gut, sent the blood streaming through her veins like the swelling of a river during a storm. It felt like… It felt like his touch was a calling, and there was a previously slumbering part of her opening an eye and rising to answer that call. 

It started to rain. Harder, thicker, heavier, until Eryk and Irina were drenched in it. She laughed in surprise; her hair was sodden, soaked through with water, and when she closed her eyes, she could feel every raindrop, every piece of it reverberating against her soul. She could sense the perfect shapes of them, the flow and sway of the water all in the ship around her, and she felt a deep kind of peace as she made the rain abate.

Eryk’s hand was still on her wrist; she’d nearly forgotten him in the rush of power. But then he said, “Irina. Look, open your eyes.”  
She opened them unwillingly, and balked. She hadn’t realised, but the ship was completely still, and people were staring at her.

“Look over the side of the boat.”   
She did.  
Where before, the waves had been churning and frothing, furious and angry…. Nothing. The water was completely, absolutely still, like a plate of glass, unnaturally smooth. No waves rocked the boat. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath.   
And then Eryk let go.  
The waves returned almost instantly, and Irina inhaled and exhaled. Slowly. Taking it in. 

“I’m a Tidemaker,” she said in awe, staring at the spot where Eryk had held her. She cradled her wrist gently.  
“And a powerful one, too,” said Eryk. His insufferable smile was back, but now there was something different in his gaze. Something guarded, hurt.   
“Are you Grisha?” she asked him. He only shook his head.   
“No. Just an amplifier. But the girl I love… she’s Etherealki. You reminded me of her for a moment.”  
Oh.  
“I’m sorry,” said Irina, but he was already turning away, running his hands through his hair. She wanted to run after him, to apologise better, because he was just a heartbroken boy chasing after a girl he hadn’t seen in years. And she’d reminded him of his pain. 

But Eryk was gone.   
＼

#### Nikolai

In Os Kervo, the young King Nikolai paced his meeting room. He ran scarred hands through shining golden-blond hair; those marks were proof of the horrors he had faced, and they had given him his title, too.   
_Korol Rezni. King of Scars._  
The three Grisha seated in the room, the Triumvirate, looked on. One drummed impatient, angry fingers on the table as she listened to the King detailing the country’s problems, which she knew well enough already. She flicked her long, luscious black hair over her shoulder and narrowed vibrant eyes.   
The other two, a woman with flame-bright hair and a satin eye patch, held tightly on to the hand of the man next to her. But it was the man, glasses perched on his nose, who was peering anxiously through documents and files.

“So Kerch wants money,” hissed Zoya Nazyalensky, the Etherealki representative of the Triumvirate. She ceased tapping her fingers on the table. “What’s new? All that motivates the Merchant Council is cold, hard cash.”  
“But we’ve been in debt for years now, and they’ve never been like this,” speculated Genya Safin, tugging on her eye patch. A sunburst was emblazoned on it in bright yellow. She wore a bright red kefta to show that she was Corporalki.  
“It has to be because of the parem. The Fjerdans, the Shu, the Zemeni… they all want someone to blame. And they still have some of our documents from the military base at Poliznaya.” Nikolai scrunched his eyes, then appeared to compose himself. He flopped in a kinglike manner into one of the chairs, straightened, and David Kostyk, Materialki, passed him another sheaf of papers. 

“Those were stolen months and months ago,” pointed out David.   
Nikolai shook his head. “You know what was in them.”  
“Nothing we can’t handle,” said Zoya. “What worries me is Kerch’s navy.”  
“They won’t attack us,” said Nikolai assuredly. “It’s good to have countries in your debt, and the whole Merchant Council knows it.”  
“I don’t think the Kerch particularly like us right now, and if they use the debt as an excuse for war… Your Highness, we can’t fight on three fronts. We’re getting so close to abolishing the draft.” Genya’s tone was tentative, but she needn’t have bothered.

“Ravka is going to ruins,” frowned Zoya. None of them disagreed.   
＼

#### Mal

When Mal came back that afternoon after a long day in the fields with the orphans, he saw Alina lying in a pool of late sunlight, threading her fingers through the patterns it created, a sad, dreamy look on her face. A half-dried palette of paint lay next to her, gathering dust, and brown pigment leeched into her long white hair. 

He walked over to her and tucked a flower behind her ear, so gently, because sometimes he felt that she was spun of glass, that if he pressed too hard she’d shatter. She was Alina, his Alina, and he would always want to protect her. He had given himself to her a long time ago. 

She smiled and sat up, dazzling in the light, and he remembered the first time he’d ever seen her use her Grisha power. He’d been numb with shock, surrounded by volcra, sure that he was about to die; his head had pounded with the realisation that the chill underneath him was blood. And then she had come ablaze, like the sun stuffed into a person, pure, blinding light that still made his eyes hurt to remember. She had changed then into someone – no, something – he didn’t recognise, and it had terrified him.  
But now he had Alina, and he had his peace. 

Alina, laughing at the brown in her hair, asking if he remembered when it was that colour. Alina, otkazat’sya just like him and no longer fated to be a terrible queen or Saint. Alina Starkov, the orphan he’d grown up with: Alina, who he loved.

At the end of that day, he took her to Trivka’s pond just as the light was waning, the sun dying in the soft blue hues of the sky. They listened to the dragonflies hum together, to the quiet symphony of the simple world around them: the rustling of leaves, the ripple of water when Mal dragged his hand through the deep green-blue.

It started to rain. Tiny gems falling from the sky, landing in Alina’s hair. _Much better than any jewels_ , Mal thought, and failed to see that the rain masked her tears.   
＼

#### Dakota

Dakota was woken the next morning by Irina, who was grinning so widely that Dakota thought her face might split in two. 

“Why are you so happy?” Dakota mumbled in Zemeni, turning over and burying her face in the pillow. “It’s too early.” Irina only looked blankly at her. She sighed. Honestly, Ravkans. 

“What is it?” she asked, trying for Ravkan. Dakota’s father had been a languages professor.   
“We’re finally here!” Irina was practically fizzing over with excitement.   
“Where?”  
“Ravka!”

Dakota wrinkled her nose. “Why are you so excited to be in Ravka?” She knew she was being difficult, but really, it was too early. 

Irina gave her a pointed look, and then, unable to keep a smile off her face for more than a minute, beamed. “We’re docking in maybe ten minutes. See you then.”  
Dakota sighed as she watched the other girl saunter out of the door, tawny brown curls bobbing. She understood Irina’s giddiness – she really did – but she couldn’t bring herself to share in her happiness. The first few days after her release from captivity had been a burst of elation, followed by a sinking feeling and the thought, Where do I go from here? She could hardly return to her Ma’s house in Novyi Zem, bordered by peaceful fields, nor could she visit her father where he worked at the Ketterdam University. They’d disowned her when she’d run away with that moon-eyed boy.

She cursed him as she left the cabin. He hadn’t even been able to protect her from the slavers; in fact, when he’d been captured, he’d handed her right over to them in exchange for his life. He was still out there, somewhere, free, and she wanted so badly to… she didn’t even know. Hurt him? Sue him? Fall in love with him again?  
She’d explained briefly to Inej that she had no place to go, but it had been to Irina that she’d poured her heart out about her situation. Sure, she hated translating everything into Ravkan, and maybe she had come off as a little angry and bitter, but Irina hadn’t been fazed. She’d listened the whole time, while simultaneously downing both her own tea and Dakota’s. 

But despite the fact that Irina had been nothing but understanding, Dakota still had no idea what to do.  
Yanking angrily on her curls the way she did when she got annoyed, Dakota made her way across the slippery planks. 

She almost missed it.  
She could barely remember his name – Alek? Erin? – but she knew his graceful, sleek form and mussed dark hair well enough to recognise him as she saw the knife in his hand. One of Inej’s knives, she thought, a blade that the kind-eyed Wraith had named after a Saint. But what made Dakota gasp was the fact that when he moved, the shadows moved with him.

As if he summoned them. As if they answered to him. As if…  
They were far enough away from the main deck and from other people that nobody saw when he surged forwards unnaturally fast, darkness spilling like oil from him, wrapping her before she could even scream. 

“Dakota,” he whispered. His name wasn’t coming to her, even now. Did it matter? The press of the darkness was cold against her, like invisible ropes binding her. She struggled against it like a wildcat, eyes widening in terror. “You saw nothing. You’ll say nothing.”  
She nodded frantically. Anything. Anything to get free, to live.

“I’ll make sure of it.”

The darkness began to swallow her rather than restrain her. Dakota tried to scream, her lungs aching with the effort of it, but it was useless.

He raised the knife, whispering its name like a curse, like a prayer, like it was the only important thing in the world.  
Alina, Alina, Alina.

＼

#### Inej

Inej frowned at Hans, who was pale-faced and wringing his hands worriedly. They’d docked barely ten minutes ago, and there was already news.  
Bad news. 

“She’s gone?”

Hans nodded. “Gone. Completely disappeared.”   
“Gone,” Inej echoed. Her hands went to the hilt of her knives for comfort – and even then, she still wasn’t reassured. Someone had taken one of her blades, and the absence of it weighed heavy on her chest. Something was going on, and she didn’t appreciate being made to feel like a pigeon. She was Inej Ghafa, the Wraith, and she tried so hard not to be afraid of anything, but she felt its nauseous grip tightening around her throat. “We were in the middle of the sea. There’s nowhere she could have gone.”  
“Unless…” Hans twiddled his thumbs reluctantly. His eyes were a pale tea colour, and they darted around uncomfortably. “Unless she threw herself off.”   
Inej shook her head. “No, she wouldn’t do that,” she said, although even as she spoke, she doubted herself. Hadn’t Dakota told her that she had no plans, that she had no place to go?

No. Dakota wouldn’t have done this, Inej was sure. Dakota had had that kind of fierce brittleness that clung to her like a burr; Inej’s father would have said that Dakota’s soul was a long-burning fire. _She will not go out until all of her wood is spent_ , he would have said, with a knowing smile and a shake of his head. Dakota had wanted to live, to burn a new path into her future.

“So what happened to her?” Inej half-muttered to herself.  
“Well, the last person who saw her was the other girl from her ship, Irina,” replied Hans. He looked up at the ceiling. “She might know where –“  
But when he cast his gaze back at Inej, she was already gone.   
Inej felt a little bad as she slipped away. She probably should have warned Hans that she’d disappear. But now she needed answers; she needed to know what was happening on her ship, especially when she was meeting Nina and her Grisha friends in only a few hours.   
Irina wasn’t hard to find: Inej could see her pacing the deck, walking backwards and forwards, wringing her hands, clearly upset. Eryk was there, trying to comfort her, but it only made Irina more agitated. 

“Dakota can’t be missing! We only just got free! This isn’t right, this… I saw her maybe twenty minutes ago. There was so much she wanted to do. No, she’s not gone. She can’t be gone.”  
“Irina,” Eryk warned. Inej had to admire him for trying; Irina was working herself into a madder and madder frenzy, getting closer to the desperation that Inej had seen in the girl’s eyes when she’d first looked down into the hold and seen fear shining there. “Maybe you should calm down.”  
“I can’t calm down – no – this is like when… she can’t just be gone,” said Irina helplessly, eventually stopping pacing and crouching down to sit on the bare deck. She seemed to be trying very hard not to cry, trading wringing her hands for rubbing her Saint’s bone almost feverishly.   
Inej understood. Irina had thought that she was finally free, finally safe, and now the illusion of that safety had been pulled out from under her like a rug.  
“Inej,” called Eryk without looking over at her. Inej felt a jolt of shock. She’d been sure that she was walking silently. How had Eryk noticed her arrival? The only person who could do that was Kaz, and Kaz was back in Ketterdam, running helpless pigeons out of their money and bossing around the Barrel. Eryk continued, “Maybe you should ask Irina what happened. I’m sure we’ll find Dakota.”  
“Eryk is right, Irina,” Inej cautioned. “You were the last person to see her. You can help us find her.”  
Irina didn’t look up. “She’s gone. I can feel it.”   
Inej was taken aback. “Don’t you want to even try and find her? How do you know?”  
“I can feel it in here, and in here,” said Irina, tapping the side of her temple and her collarbone while frowning. “But I’ll tell you everything I know.”

 

They didn’t find Dakota.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if anyone's actually reading this, thank you! feel free to leave kudos/comments etc because i still have no idea whether this majorly sucks or if it's pointless lol. i know it's kind of slow right now but there is definitely ~intense action~ on the way.


	4. The Door Wasn't Locked

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maybe it’s time to celebrate the hideous. Not  
> to confess with some hope for absolution,  
> but to gather all the terrible selves and minutes  
> and show them the trees, and the way the rain
> 
> has just abated so the air has ocean in it  
> though we’re dry and waiting. Part of me died here  
> so another could go on. The body I raised  
> and abandoned still walking the path on the hill  
> where I became larger than myself and the day
> 
> could no longer contain me.
> 
> \- Marty McConnell
> 
> \---  
> have you been wondering (a) what our problematic fave was up to (b) what irina's actually doing in this story or (c) where is my best girl nina? you get (a bit at least) of each! enjoy, i love all 8 of you who left kudos so far <3

#### Nikolai

“Don’t leave me alone in Os Kervo,” pleaded Nikolai as he waved off the Triumvirate, but his heart wasn’t in it. He would miss them, but they would be back soon. They always were. Still, he had always had his three Grisha with him since the start of his reign, there to back him up, cajole him, or, in David’s case, stare blankly at his jokes.

“Shut up, you big baby,” retorted Zoya, rolling her eyes. Genya snickered behind her hand while David looked vaguely concerned.  
“Zoya, you can’t call him that,” pointed out David, a confused look on his face. “He’s the king.”  
“David’s right, Zoya,” grinned King Nikolai. “I’m the king.”

They left all too soon, and when they had left, Nikolai felt empty, as he always did. His country was falling to pieces. He was facing the prospect of another war. The problems with _jurda parem_ were still to be completely eliminated, and he still hadn’t managed to get rid of the draft.  
He wondered sometimes what would have happened if Alina had said yes when he’d asked her, so long ago, to be his queen. If the loss of her power would have made a difference. It probably would have, to most of the country, but he knew he still would have married her even if she wasn’t a Saint with strange Grisha powers. She understood the darkness in him that he still felt sometimes, beating next to his heartbeat like a dark, pounding drum. She could have made it whole, because even without her Grisha powers, Alina was a burst of light. Stark. Refreshing.

He shook his head, looking out of the window at the resplendent turrets of the city beyond. Would Alina have been happy with him? Nikolai knew she was content with Oretsev. He’d visited their orphanage, and while it was beautiful, it seemed so… Sheltered. Small. It was barely anything to compare to the vibrancy of the world outside, just a quiet little backwater filled with daisies and children. He probably would have gone insane, if someone had shut him up like that in a secluded, motionless slice of the world, after everything he’d seen and done.  
Because there was so much more to fix, so much more to do. The Darkling was gone, but Nikolai still needed to save Ravka.

He had to believe he could do it. 

＼

#### Irina

Irina was still feeling miserable when she stepped off the boat, but much less hysterical than she’d been earlier. She didn’t know what had happened, only that she’d felt a weird kind of emptiness in the space between her collarbones, as if there was a void there, a kind of lightless emptiness. Somehow, she felt like it was the world’s way of telling her: Dakota was gone.

She hadn’t had any special connection to the strange, fiery girl. Dakota had been brittle and harsh, but she’d had her own demons to run from. The difference was that unlike Irina, she’d had nowhere to go.  
Dakota had been running from her own mistakes when she realised that the boy she loved had turned against her, after turning her against her own family. Irina was running from something bigger, something worse.

 _Not now_ , she told herself. If she remembered the night she had been captured now, she might as well not set foot in Ravka for fear. 

She swallowed her rising panic – why was that getting harder and harder to do these days? – and followed Inej and Eryk. The harbours on the coast of West Ravka had always fascinated her, and it was a blessing to feel the bright, autumn sun beating down on her face, to hear the familiar sound and scent the spices and tangs in the air that she knew all too well. The atmosphere here was purer, too, free of Ketterdam’s corruption. To Irina, this was where she belonged. This was home.

A group of Grisha walked past, clad in the deep red and purple of Corporalki and Materialki. Eryk nudged her gently. “Look at that,” he said, and a retort rose on her lips, but she bit it down and did what he said.  
“I’ve always wanted to wear a kefta,” she said quietly. “Just like my sister’s. Summoner’s blue.”  
“And you will,” he promised. She remembered what he’d said, that the girl he loved was a Summoner, and saw the look that flashed over his finely hewn features. Longing?  
“What type of Etherealki was she?” Irina asked. “The Grisha you came back for?”  
“A Summoner,” he said, which wasn’t clear at all. She was beginning to be sorry she’d asked, when he said, “and she was the only one for me.”

“That’s kind of beautiful,” said Irina. “What’s it like to be in love?”  
“I don’t suppose you’d know,” Eryk laughed, jostling her. “You look around twelve.”  
“I’m fifteen,” she sniped back, shoving him. Hard. “I never really had a chance. My Madraya was… different. We didn’t live close to anyone else.”  
A lie, even if some of it was true. She had had a chance – once – with Kostya, although neither of them had ever said anything about love. She’d felt things, stirring in her chest, but it could have easily been the starting of her Grisha power. Or the flu. Her mother had never told her what being in love felt like, so Irina had needed to guess for herself.  
Eryk’s mouth quirked at the side. “I had a strange Madraya, too.”

She noticed that he’d skipped around her question, but went on.

“No, I mean my mother was really something else. She was otkazat’sya, but she lived in a hut in the woods with us. I love her, but people call her crazy. Anastasiya was so glad when she became Grisha, and she got to move away. I never knew any boys my age, except when…” Irina trailed off. She didn’t need to tell anyone what had happened to her in the weeks leading up to her capture, much less even think about it. She’d mostly managed not to until now. Unbidden, Kostya’s face swam into her mind, his unwavering blue eyes calling out to her across the void, the swoop of shadowy wings and the screams – 

_Don’t think about it, Irina. It’ll drive you crazy._  
She didn’t even know where Kostya was. 

Eryk was watching her keenly, interest pooling in those slate-grey eyes. He didn’t press the matter further, but just said, “And I thought you were just paranoid and crazy for nothing.”

“What?” Irina gasped, shocked out of her reverie. She blushed, realizing she hadn’t been acting her best for a long time now. She’d been better, stronger once; Kostya had laughed at her talisman and said that he didn’t need Saints when he was with her, because she was a miracle enough. She’d balked at the idea, especially since she didn’t need the approval of others to determine her self-worth, but the words had been nice all the same. Now what would Kostya see if he looked at her? A shriveled, hysterical wreck? 

She didn’t know how to reply to Eryk, and there were a couple of beats of silence. Irina was still struggling with the picture of Kostya in her head. Now that she’d thought of him, she couldn’t seem to stop.

“What was his name?” Eryk’s voice cut through her thoughts, again, like a knife.  
“I’ll tell you his name if you tell me hers.”  
Eryk barked a short laugh. “No deal. A fact for a fact, but I won’t tell you her name.”  
“It’s a deal.”

Inej had rounded back to sneak up on them without them noticing, and materialized soundlessly next to Irina, who flinched. Inej didn’t seem to notice. “Making deals over the smallest things,” she said, tilting her head. “You’re practically Kerch.”  
“She was about to go first,” said Eryk, nodding at Irina. “What’s their name? I can tell there was someone, just looking at you.”  
She pursed her lips together. “Kostya.”  
“Old name,” said Eryk.  
Inej shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”  
Irina rounded on Eryk as they turned a corner into a brightly lit square. “So, the girl you came all the way back to Ravka for… What’s her favourite food?”  
Eryk’s face split into a grin. “She loves sweet foods. Cake, pudding, blini… She hates herrings, though.”  
“A Ravkan that doesn’t like herrings?” Inej sounded amused. 

“Truly amazing,” agreed someone in front of them. It was a girl Irina had never seen before, large and beautiful, with brilliant emerald eyes like freshly cut grass. Inej beamed as the girl threw herself at her, hugging her so tightly that Irina thought Inej would fall apart.

“Inej!”  
“Nina!”

“I haven’t seen you in so long! There are some amazing waffles at this stall –“  
“Nina,” said Inej firmly, “waffles can wait.”  
“Inej, you are walking a dangerous path.”

Inej laughed. “This is Irina, a Tidemaker; she wants to go to the Little Palace to join the Second Army, where her sister is.”  
Nina took in Irina and nodded, much to Irina’s relief. “All Grisha are accepted at the Little Palace. What’s your family name?”  
“Lebedev,” said Irina, smiling hesitantly. “Do you know my sister? Anastasiya, she’s a –“  
“Summoner? I guess I remember a girl with a face like yours, all in a blue kefta.”  
Irina beamed, feeling better than she had in weeks. She still had a chance to see Anastasiya, and maybe, if she was lucky, Kostya. “That’s her name. And this is Eryk.”  
Eryk gave a little half-salute. “At your service.”  
“It’s already a miniature army,” said Nina drily, but a smile curled her lips. She looked at Eryk. “Are you Grisha, too? Are you coming to the city?”  
Eryk lifted his head. “If it’s no trouble. I have a Grisha to meet. Are you Nina Zenik? The Heartrender?”  
Nina nodded. She raised an eyebrow at Inej. “Been spreading stories?”

Inej only shrugged, a half smile on her lips. “Everyone wants to hear about the great Nina Zenik.”  
“Don’t encourage me. Zoya says I’m bad enough as it is.”  
“Zoya Nazyalensky? You know a member of the Triumvirate?” Irina was shocked. The Triumvirate were possibly the three highest-ranking Grisha in all of Ravka, and all of them had been through civil war and back. At least one of them had the physical scars to prove it. She’d heard so much about them; the Fjerdans on the slave ship had been terrified at the mention of Zoya Nazyalensky’s name, calling her a witch, and the lone Grisha girl who they’d captured had smiled at her name and said that she hoped the Triumvirate would come and smash the slavers to pieces. 

Irina reassessed the girl in front of her. Nina seemed bright and friendly, but she did wear a red kefta. Irina knew how dangerous the Corporalki could be.  
Nina sighed. “Yes. They’re back that way. Do you have any other Grisha that you want me to introduce to them?” she said, asking Inej the last part.  
Inej shook her head. “Most of the liberated people are still on the ship; we’re taking them to Novyi Zem and the Wandering Isle next. We’re taking them home.”  
“Noble Inej,” smiled Nina, but they she was already leading the, back through the square to a small tavern. “They’re inside here.”

She ducked down to enter – Nina was really very tall – and Inej floated in after her on panther-soft feet, followed by Irina and Eryk. Irina couldn’t believe her luck. Not only was she finally going to the Little Palace, but she was meeting the three most important Grisha of the age. She wished Kostya was here to meet them with her.  
Maybe it was better off that Kostya wasn’t here. She didn’t know quite what they’d do with him.

“You want to join the Second Army?” Nina asked Irina. She nodded enthusiastically. 

“I do. I was hoping to go to Os Alta anyway to be with my sister, because I’m… I’m an amplifier, but now that I’m a Tidemaker, I want to join up.”  
“It’s the right choice. Ravka needs more Grisha, and you’ll be a lot happier when you’re finally safe. It’s good to be among your own people.”  
“Haven’t I always been among my own people? I am Ravkan as well as Grisha.”

A faint smile curled Nina’s mouth. “You’re a clever one. You’re also right. I should choose my words better. What I mean is that it’s nice not to be hunted by everyone around you.”  
Irina laughed. “That does sound good.”

They came to stop at a low, wooden table, where three people sat. One was a gorgeous, raven-haired young woman in a shimmering blue kefta, speaking very low and very fast to the red-haired lady next to her, who wore a blue-and-red kefta and a silken eye patch. The third was a man, apparently sleeping on the table, who seemed to be covered in some kind of soot. The dark-haired woman flicked her wrist, and a burst of Squaller wind blew it away.

“David!” hissed the flame-haired girl, who Irina knew must be Genya Safin, the first Tailor. “David, wake up!” She nudged the sleeping man’s arm, and he sat up suddenly, glasses askew. 

“Oh,” he said, taking in Nina and the group behind her. “Hello.” He turned to Genya. “Listen, I had a dream, and I think that if we apply the right heat to the serum you were working on –“  
Nina cleared her throat. Zoya Nazyalensky, the beautiful Squaller in blue, frowned at David. “You can sweet-talk Genya later, Kostyk. Nina’s back, and she’s brought a crowd.”  
Inej gave a little bow, smiling, and Nina just tossed her hair back. Irina noticed, however, that Eryk seemed to be drinking in the sight of the three Grisha with his eyes. She couldn’t read his expression at all.

“Here are the Grisha Inej mentioned. She wants to join the second army.” Nina gestured to Irina.  
Irina blushed. “I’m Irina Lebedev.”  
“Brilliant!” Genya smiled and clapped her hands together.  
“That’s the first good thing to come out of today,” said Zoya, but there was less bite to her words this time. “What order?”  
“Etherealki. I think I’m a Tidemaker,” said Irina.

“Your lot,” said Genya, turning to Zoya, who just flicked an invisible speck of dust off the sleeve of her kefta. “What about you?” She turned to Eryk.

Eryk opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment, something shook the ground.

Irina was blown off her feet, and the air was stolen from her lungs. People all around them screamed, and Zoya stood up straight, Genya springing to action beside her. David seemed alert for once, scanning the crowd. Dust filled the air. 

Irina saw Inej look to Nina, and Nina nodded, whatever that meant. Inej drew one of her blades from her boot, narrowed her eyes, and Nina raised her arms.  
And then it began. Darkness spread over the building, blocking out all of the light from the windows, making it impossible to see. A kind of eerie coldness crept up Irina’s spine, and her heart raced even as she listened to people screaming.

“He’s back! He’s truly back!”  
“I watched him burn, this shouldn’t be right!”  
She could hear prayers, confessions, people yelling that this was the end of the world.

“Saints,” murmured Zoya from somewhere. “I thought I’d seen the last of this. Alina stabbed him –“  
“You can’t hear volcra,” pointed out Genya. “It might not be him.”  
“It was only ever him.”  
But Irina didn’t care to understand what they meant. Before she lost all consciousness, only one word reverberated throughout her head, tearing at her soul, making tears stream down her face. She managed to whisper it once before plunging into oblivion.  
Kostya.  
＼  
She knew she was dreaming. 

Dreams were nothing new to Irina, although more often than not, they ended up nightmares; she feared them, but she welcomed them too, because her sleep was the only time she let herself think of Kostya. And now she was reliving it all over again.

The weeks before she’d met him had been desperate, terrified. A man had come to her mother’s door, face hooded, asking after her sister. Her mother, crazy as she was, had seemed to come alert and wary when she saw his face, more awake than Irina had ever seen her.

“Hide,” her mother had hissed, terror and clarity shining in her eyes. “And if you hear anything suspicious, if I don’t come back, take the money from the box under my bed and run.”  
“Where will I run?” asked Irina, managing to keep her voice even. Back then, before she had lost Kostya, Irina had been the model of calm confidence, built on years of hardening her heart against the villagers that insulted her and her mother every time they saw her. 

“To Os Alta. To your sister. You’ll be safe with the Grisha.”

In that moment, Irina’s cool exterior had cracked, letting a little of the fear shine through. “Madraya?”

“Yes, Irina?”  
“I love you.”

Irina had hidden upstairs, already pushing through the junk under her mother’s bed, past stacking dolls and old paintings, until she had found the box: a small, plain thing with a sunburst marked on the side. She vaguely recognized the symbol from the civil war, the mark of the Soldat Sol. What did her mother have to do with them?

She’d only had time to grab the money inside when she heard her mother screaming. “Get out of my house! You have no right to be here!”

And then there had been a jarring shaking of the building, and she’d sworn she could have heard an animal’s cry, high, keening, angry. But it was unlike any animal Irina had ever heard, and she’d been frozen still with terror.  
Then, a sudden, horrifyingly empty silence. Common sense had overridden Irina then, and she’d thrown on a cloak and a fur hat, scooped up the money, and jumped out of the window to where she knew a branch was. The rough bark had scraped her hands; leaves had tangled in her hair. She’d run then, as fast as her legs would carry her, all the way to the town, where people who had once jeered at her looked at her with terror in their eyes.

Because above the forest, a cloud of something black was rising.  
Right above Irina’s house.

She’d paid her way for travel to a small village in the north, and it was there that the money had run out. Starving and freezing, she had retreated to the woods, where thankfully the branches were still hung low with the ripe fruits of summer. She’d gratefully eaten, picking as many as she could and stowing them in her cloak for later, licking the sweet juice off her fingers, all the while planning how she’d get to Os Alta.

She would make her way to a major town or city, she decided, and find some Grisha. Or she could convince a traveller or trader to take her to Os Alta; after all, people came and went to the capital all the time. She might even find someone who had heard of her sister who could take her there. But her main concern was safety; she knew she was only a fifteen-year-old otkazat’sya girl, untrained, weaponless. Defenceless.

Irina was reminded even further of her vulnerability when she heard a rustle in the trees behind her. Her breath caught in her chest, and she backed up against a tree. Her hand flew to the Saint’s bone around her neck, and she muttered a quiet plea under her breath. Sankta Alina, keep me safe.  
Then the trees had rustled again, this time closer, and overhead. Irina had wanted so badly to close her eyes, to disappear and block out the world around her, but she stayed vigilant, forcing herself to pick up a branch off the floor. She peeled away the bark, trying to sharpen it.

A third rustle. Directly in front of her.  
She lifted the branch.

And then a boy tumbled from the treetops, a boy barely taller than her, with a crop of messy hair blond hair and a confused expression as he landed on his back with a soft “Oof!”  
Apples tumbled down around him, and a cloth satchel that had been slung over his shoulder now spilled more fruits.  
Irina couldn’t help it. She laughed.

The boy had risen, trying desperately to gather up his food with dignity, but had failed. “Stop laughing.” He’d blushed, and at that, Irina had moved forwards to help him.  
“Why? You look funny,” she’d said, her hands flying as she neatly placed apple after apple in his bag. 

It was true, too. He had leaves in his hair and an impish grin on his face, and the trees seemed to be giggling too as they rustled. Irina’s laugh wasn’t all because of him, though; it was slightly panicked and relieved, because she realized now that she’d just been frightened of a clumsy boy.

 _Just because he’s clumsy doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous,_ she’d reminded herself, and scooted a little further away from him.

He didn’t seem to notice. “Not that funny. You were going to defend yourself with a stick.”  
She grimaced. “It was a good stick.”  
“What are you frightened of, anyway?”  
She let out a laugh. “You can’t be serious. I’m weaponless, travelling on my own, in the middle of the woods. Everything. It’s sensible to be frightened of everything.”  
He’d looked up, as if unsure that she was serious. “In these woods, I’ve never been afraid.”  
“There are woods where the trees eat girls.”  
“Not these,” said the strange boy. “I grew up in them. The trees wouldn’t ever eat anyone.”  
“I’m not taking my chances,” said Irina, straightening up. She gave him an assessing glance. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”  
“I’m getting away,” he’d said cheerfully. “From the village.”  
“You ran away? Why?”

He shook his head, tossing leaves onto the ground. “No, you don’t understand. My parents died. Stuff happened. The village doesn’t want me.”  
She crossed her arms, feeling a pang of pity. “So where are you going?”

He’d looked up at the canopy of leaves above them, his slate-grey gaze far-off, unfocused. “I don’t know. To the biggest city I can find, and then I’ll find a job.”  
One second of silence had passed. Irina had grappled with herself before saying quietly, “I’m going to Os Alta. To the Little Palace, to see my sister.”

Slowly, he’d looked at her, understanding filling his eyes. “Os Alta is a pretty big city.”

She shrugged, and smiled a little. “Like I said, I’m travelling alone. It’s pretty unsafe, you know, traveling on your own in times like this.”  
He pitched in. “Of course, it would make a lot more sense for me to travel with someone that has an actual destination. Like Os Alta.”  
“Sure. You’d have to understand that the person you were travelling with might not have a lot of money.”  
“Neither do I. It’s fine.” He’d actually grinned then. “What would be the name of the person I went with?”

She stuck out her hand. “Irina Lebedev. What’s your name?”

“Kostya.” He leaned over and shook it, and she’d grinned back at him too then, feeling much less alone than when she’d started her journey. “Kostya Grushov.” 

From then on, they’d been a pair, taking it in turns to find food and shelter, keeping each other company, watching each other’s backs. Kostya had started calling her Ree right after she’d told him her name. She’d punched him in the shoulder and told him to shut up, and he’d only rolled his eyes before saying, “Sure thing, Ree.”

Eventually, she’d started feeling a flutter in her chest whenever she looked at him. Stupid, she told herself. She’d probably say goodbye to Kostya when they got to Os Alta and never see him again. What were feelings good for? 

Then the shadowbird had come, and everything had changed.  
＼

#### Triumvirate

While Irina was unconscious, darkness unfolded over the tavern, sending tendrils of black into the sky. Genya had grasped for David’s hand, because they both knew what this meant.  
“I thought he was gone,” hissed Zoya. “We watched him burn.”  
The Triumvirate was silent for a moment, remembering. The three of them had been there. A man laid out on a pyre next to a fake Saint, hair combed back neatly, swathed in a dark kefta. They had watched the flames consume him, wreathing smoke into the sky.

“The problem with closing a door,” David said quietly, “is that it doesn’t always stay shut.”

The darkness lifted, so suddenly that the light made people wince. 

And then they saw what had happened while they were blind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "the problem with closing a door is that it doesn't always stay shut" is a real quote by leigh bardugo from when she was asked about the possibility of there ever being another grisha with darkles' powers. i thought it was appropriate to use in this context.
> 
> next chapter, prepare for conflicted emotions and some death! as always feel free to leave a kudos or come talk to me, my tumblr is @feyrelight. thank you so so much for reading :)  
> -  
> also if you havent read tgt (spoiler alert!), the person that everyones so afraid of is the darkling (aleksander morozova), who can manipulate darkness. he believes he loves alina + wants to make her his queen, who thinks she killed him, because she is the sun summoner - except she gave up her powers to defeat him and instead went to live in an orphanage with mal, her childhood friend.


	5. Heartsick / Eclipsed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The terrible reunions in store for her  
> will take up the rest of her life.  
> When the passion for expiation  
> is chronic, fierce, you do not choose  
> the way you live. You do not live;  
> you are not allowed to die.
> 
> \- Louise Glück
> 
> \----  
> i promised you it would happen! it's happening! plus zoya sass!

#### Irina

There was a pounding in Irina’s head even before she opened her eyes. She could hear a crackling fire, someone’s deep, heavy breathing, and the sounds of rain hitting something. Strangely enough, she didn’t seem to be wet.

A branch snapped. Her eyes flew open. 

Eryk was sitting beside her, a worried frown creasing his features, staring into a homemade fire and rubbing his hands. Beside him, she could see the form of the Heartrender girl – Nina Zenik – as she lay on the dry ground underneath a makeshift shelter, either sleeping or knocked out.

“What’s going on?” she croaked. She sat up, surprised to find that her clothes were almost completely dry, barely touched by the rain pouring down around them. She shivered and pulled her cloak a little closer, not taking her eyes off Eryk. 

He looked over, and relief flooded his features. “Oh, good. You’re awake.” He tossed her an apple; the sight of it made something in her heart twang with memory. Kostya. She’d first seen him falling from an apple tree, clumsy and beautiful.

She picked up the apple, but didn’t bite into it, instead feeling its smooth skin under her fingertips. “Where are we?”  
Eryk shrugged. “What’s the last thing you remember?”  
“Darkness… the tavern.” She could still hear the people’s screams, feel the crushing inky blackness on her skin like a layer of oil. Still, it wasn’t as if she wasn’t used to people summoning darkness.

“That’s all I remember, too, said Eryk, poking the fire with a twig. “Then I woke up here. You two were still knocked out, and I could see it was going to rain, so I built us a shelter and a fire. I think I know where we are. I might be able to lead us to a village for safety.”  
“You could have just left us.” 

“But you’re glad I didn’t,” he said with a twist of his mouth that looked suspiciously like a smile.

“How will we get to Os Alta now?” Irina heard the keening desperation in her own voice; her plan had been to thank Inej, and then stick with Nina and the Grisha until Os Alta where she could finally be reunited with her sister. Now how would she get there? Sure, Nina was with her, but Irina had no clue where they were, and Eryk hadn’t been in Ravka in years. How would he know where they were?

“I’ll get us there,” said Eryk, and there was something so resolute in his voice that Irina couldn’t help but trust him.

She raised the apple to her mouth and bit down. It was sweet, like the late summer sun, but she could taste something bitter underneath, something like darkness.  
When Nina awoke, with slitted, furious green eyes, Irina sat and Eryk explained. He seemed to have a way with words, and he had tempered even Nina Zenik, casting off her suspicious glances with barely a thought.  
The rain eventually abated, and Eryk led them outside, where the grass still smelled sweet with the memory of the pouring sky. He led them through trees, over hills, and even when the sun started to dip in the sky, he did not stop.

“Almost there,” he said. 

Soon, Irina saw buildings spread out before them, a low village where people were laughing and jostling each other, heading home from work. In the market, people were packing up their stalls, and cobbled stone ran underfoot. She caught the occasional glimpse of First and Second army uniforms, and Nina wanted to stop and talk to them, but Eryk shook his head. 

“I know a place we can stay,” he said. Nina, strangely, didn’t question him, but when they approached the house, she gasped.  
“Saints, I thought this place was burned down,” she whispered, clutching a hand to her chest. Her grass-green eyes were wide. “How did we get this far from the coast?”

“Where are we?” asked Irina carefully. They had come to a long building, bordered by trees and greenery. In the front garden, there was a thick tree stump which Nina gazed at, horrified.  
“I haven’t been here in years,” said Nina. “This is the orphanage at Keramzin.” She whirled on Eryk. “Why are we here? Who do you know?”  
Eryk only shrugged, and his gaze seemed to linger on the tree stump too. A faint smile curled the edges of his lips. He turned to Irina. “Remember how I told you there was a girl I loved?”  
“Yes? The one with a sweet tooth who hates herrings? The Grisha?”  
“Well, she grew up here.”  
Nina’s eyes were narrow and suspicious, but she followed Eryk up to the front door.

Irina stood at the start of the path for a moment, watching them go, hesitating. It was almost twilight, and the darkness of night was starting to come over the early autumn sky in washes of deep blue and violet. The moon shone above, warring with the last rays of the sun’s light, catching in Eryk’s dark hair, in the shimmer of Nina’s kefta, in the many flowers that had been neatly laid out by the front door.  
She took a deep breath and followed them inside. Her footsteps seemed too loud in the peaceful quiet of the garden, which buzzed with insects and animals as the day drew to a close.

Eryk knocked.

There was a moment, then the sound of scuffling footsteps as someone behind the door moved.  
A child called out. “There’s someone at the door!”

“I’m coming,” replied a man’s cheerful, gruff voice. He spoke to the child in light, friendly tones. “Hurry off, you! I’m sure the cook has something sweet for you.”  
There was the scrabbling noise of the door being unlocked, and it swung open.

Behind it was a man with chestnut hair and unassuming blue eyes, at least two heads taller than Irina herself. He smiled at them easily.  
A child called down the hall. “Who is it?”  
“Alexei!” The man turned to scold the child, and past him, Irina caught the glimpse of a long hall, its walls covered in beautiful, whimsical paintings: a flying ship, streams of flowers, a firebird soaring on wings of flame. “I’m so sorry,” he said, facing them again. “The children get curious sometimes.”  
“It’s good for children to be curious,” said Nina, smiling, though her eyes still darted around nervously. 

Eryk seemed to have tightened, tensed, and he looked the man at the door coolly in the eyes.  
“We’ve come for Alina.”

The effect was like someone had slapped the man in the face. He stumbled back a step, his brow creasing. “I’m sorry, but there isn’t an Alina here. Maybe you meant Iliana – she’s about four, although I’d say none of you look old enough to be parents.”  
Nina was gaping at Eryk; her face had gone pale and slack in realisation. “Alina,” she whispered. “Do you mean –“  
Eryk held up a hand, and she fell silent. Irina was shocked; Nina Zenik didn’t seem like the kind of person to be easily quietened. 

“It’s all right, Oretsev,” he said quietly. The tall, blue-eyed man – Oretsev, Eryk had called him – looked shocked, his blue eyes flickering to take the three of them in. Irina knew they must look strange, three teenagers standing on his doorstep, messy from the woods, illuminated by the fading light, although in truth he was only a young man. “We’re here for the crown.”

Irina remembered where she’d heard the name Oretsev before. It was part of the legacy of Sankta Alina – Alina, who was supposed to have died years ago on the Shadow Fold during Ravka’s civil war. She tensed. That was why Nina looked so strange, why the man – Mal Oretsev – was so strained that he looked like he might yell or slam the door in their faces.  
Then he relaxed a little. “Nikolai sent you?” He scrunched his nose. “He’s never done that before.”

Eryk looked at him hard. “We have news for Alina.”

Mal crossed his arms. Irina noticed that he was handsome, but that he was hard around the eyes, as if he’d seen too much, and he moved like a soldier. “Alina doesn’t take news anymore. We’ve been left out of conflict for years now, and we’d like it to stay that way. We have our peace.”

“Papa, Madraya’s coming!” yelled a little boy from behind Oretsev. Irina heard light, quiet footsteps, and then there was a young woman approaching behind them.  
“Mark,” she said, trying to get past Oretsev, “let me past so I can see.”

“Beloved,” he said, turning to face her, still hiding her from view for the most part. Irina saw Eryk roll his eyes at the word, but Mal missed it. Nina’s jaw was actually agape. Past Mal, Irina could see the flash of white hair, a girl’s slender wrist and bare feet. “There are people here who say they’re from Nikolai, asking after Alina.”  
“Mark, move out of the way,” the young woman said again, and pushed past him to see them. She smiled a little, a warm smile that spoke of sunlight and brilliancy. She had long white hair down to her waist, and she was slender, almost as short as Irina; her eyes widened slightly when she saw the three of them standing there.

“You look a little ragged for a royal convoy,” she said after a second. “But you said you were after an Alina. Of course, there’s no Alina here.”

“And what might your name be? We were to deliver a message to a certain white-haired young lady,” Eryk asked her, but Irina saw his jaw tense and knew that something was irking him. She still couldn’t read the expression on his face. It worried her a little. What was going on? What he was telling them didn’t add up to what he’d told her and Nina.

“My name is Aleksandra,” said the girl. “If Nikolai sent you, that must have been what he told you.”

Irina only saw it because she’d been around Eryk for the past few days and had memorized his movements and quirks the way she did with everyone new. It was the catch in his breath, the sudden emotion in his eyes, but she couldn’t fathom why. It was there and gone in a flash, but she recognized it well enough.

Heartsick. He’s heartsick.

But why? Over the ex-Saint Alina, who he didn’t look at all surprised to see alive? Maybe King Nikolai had sent him after all, and he just hadn’t told them.  
“You should come inside,” said Malyen Oretsev, and they were herded in. Irina felt the warmth brush her skin, and was grateful. She hadn’t realized she’d become so cold outside, where the chill of night was already starting to settle over everything like a fine lace blanket.

They were shown to a little room with couches and a low table, where a servant went to pour them tea before Aleksandra – Alina – waved them off, smiling and saying she could do it herself. Malyen seemed to bristle a little at that, but said nothing.  
When they were all seated, the fire burning brightly in the background, its light creeping up the finely painted walls, a cup of tea leeching heat into everyone’s hands, Alina spoke.

“So what sends three messengers from King Nikolai all the way to a lowly orphanage in Keramzin?”  
“It’s not that lowly,” said Malyen, smirking and lacing his hand with hers. Irina didn’t let her gaze linger too long on them, though; instead she marked Eryk’s reaction. It wasn’t as noticeable as last time, but there was a strain to him that Irina wasn’t used to seeing. It was like somewhere, deep, down inside a chasm, in a locked box, there was an outburst of emotion that he was very good at concealing.  
Or maybe he just didn’t like the tea. He’d taken one sip of it and left it since.

“A lot,” said Eryk, setting down the cup entirely. “Have you heard of jurda parem?”  
Alina’s face shuttered, those brown eyes going hard. She nestled imperceptibly closer to Mal, as if he were a source of heat or light or comfort. “Yes. And Nikolai said he wouldn’t bother me about it.”  
“Even if it could bring back your powers?”  
Malyen laughed. “Parem kills ordinary people.”

But Irina had been watching them closely. She had noted the way Malyen frowned and drew himself up at the mention of Grisha power, as if offended; how keenly Eryk was searching Alina’s face, as if trying to solve some kind of puzzle; and most of all, how Alina’s face had briefly lit up for a second.  
The expression was hard to place.  
Hope.

Then it was gone again, and she shook her head vehemently, as if she was convincing herself. “No. Not interested. The provincial backwater life is great.”  
There was something bitter underlying it, and Eryk must have gotten his answer, because he slumped back as if defeated, ceasing his scanning of Alina’s face. He shrugged. “I told him you’d say no, but the king’s getting desperate.”

Nina, who had been in shock up until then, suddenly blurted out, “Why? Why are you stuck here like this?”  
Alina seemed taken aback. “Why not?”  
“You could’ve been a queen, and… I’m not saying orphans aren’t great… But you died. You’re both supposed to be dead.”  
Malyen was staring at Nina fiercely. “And?”  
Nina’s fingers gripped her kefta so tightly; Irina thought they might break off. “Normally, when people die, they don’t get to come back from the dead, no matter how much you love them. Not all of us are as lucky as that.”

On impulse, Irina leaned over and squeezed the girl’s hand tightly. She barely knew her, but she couldn’t imagine that Nina spoke that way for no reason. She’d lost someone. There was a hauntedness to her that was bleaker, emptier than any kind of spectre. In that moment, Irina saw past the fiercely bright personality and realised that part of Nina was a dead girl walking.

Nina hesitated only a second before squeezing back.

Alina was looking at Nina with something like clarity in her eyes. “No. The dead don’t normally come back. But you learn to appreciate it when they do.”  
Irina felt everything that happened next with such crystal clearness that she wanted to cry.

Malyen Oretsev’s cup falling from his hands, shattering on the ground, sending beads of his drink rolling across the darkly tinted wooden floor like iridescent pearls. A dark stain started to bloom, and Alina turned to him in dismay as he started to cough, and retch, and splutter.  
“Alina –“ He turned to her, eyes widening with fear. She was grabbing his wrists now, shaking him, and Irina felt fear bloom through her chest.  
He began to choke up blood, a thin spray that landed on the floorboards in a fine layer, staining Alina’s white hair, Alina’s white hands, Alina’s white dress. White and red, swan feathers and scarlet.  
“Mal!” she cried out, forgetting to use his fake name, Mark, in that instance. People came running, worried teachers and servants and nervous students.  
“Poison, it must be poison,” Alina muttered under her breath. She half-laughed, half-cried. “Nobody’s ever tried to poison you before.” She smiled weakly at Malyen.  
Then she seemed to register Nina. “Fix him! You’re wearing a red kefta, you’re Corporalki – please, please fix him, I am _begging_ you.”  
Nina’s face had gone even whiter, terrified, but determined. “I’ll try. But I’m not a Corporalki anymore. I don’t know that there’s anything I can do.”  
“Try! Bring him back to me!”  
Nina raised her hands, her brow furrowed in concentration. Long seconds passed, and Malyen went completely still. 

“No, Mal, no, I –“ Alina gasped as she sobbed, placing one hand over her heart and one over Mal’s.  
Nina let out a cry, and Malyen Oretsev’s head jerked up.  
“He’s alive!” Alina’s hands jumped to her mouth.  
Shaking her head, Nina flicked her wrist. The red-clad Heartrender’s face was the picture of sorrow and memory as she twitched her fingers, and Malyen raised one arm, then the other, in a kind of robotic movement, his limbs stiff and jerky.  
“I’m so sorry, Sankta,” Nina whispered. Her green eyes were devastated. “I can control him. That means… he is one of mine.”  
“You mean –“ Eryk breathed.

“He is no longer alive.” Nina breathed in, and Irina felt a wave of terror and fear break over her. “As long as I can control him, he is dead.”  
＼

#### The Little Palace

When Zoya, David and Genya returned to the Little Palace, all with grim looks on their faces that Nikolai Lantsov knew too well, he pulled them aside before they spoke at the Council. He’d said nothing when they’d told him their worst suspicions: that the Darkling was rising again. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. He’d tried to make a joke, but in their uneasiness, none of them had laughed.

A day later, the King of Ravka received a letter sent in a thick black envelope. He read the single sheet of paper quickly at first, his brows furrowing deeper and deeper, making his advisors wonder what could possibly be going wrong.

The crown glinted on his head as he shoved back a chair, stood tall, and called for the still-shaken Triumvirate, as well as several other Grisha, all well-known figures who had fought in the Ravkan civil war. Tolya and Tamar Yul-Bataar. The powerful sibling Squallers. A man with fiery hair and a cat that he sometimes spoke to.  
They were used to the King disappearing, but it had never happened like this before. Nobody said where he was going with these veterans; the letter was burnt after he had passed it around to the Triumvirate. All anybody knew was that his face was set grimly, and in his trunk were dark clothes. Not black, because that colour still held too much weight. But these were clothes for mourning.  
Clothes to honour death.

And so the troika left, the bright kefta of the Grisha aboard fading into the distance.

One noble lady whispered, “It must be Fjerda.”

Another shook her head. “No. This is something closer to home.” She put her hand over her heart.  
“Closer to here.”  
＼

#### Alina

Alina Starkov did not shed any tears at the funeral, although even a few of the teachers sniffled, and most of the children around her were either bawling or silent in shock.

“Papa Mark is gone!”

_You will not cry_ , she told herself, picking up four-year-old Iliana in her arms, cradling the girl’s cap of dark curls while she sobbed. Not in front of the children.  
They didn’t even use his real name when he was lowered into the ground. Not that Mal would have minded. He had loved who he was to the orphans, and he’d been just as much Mark (even if Mark hadn’t been fully real) as he’d been Mal. She thought of the first time he’d died, the desperation, the gasping breathlessness that had left her empty after she’d plunged the knife into his chest. He’d lived again, a second, beautiful life, but for what? For it all to be snatched away again? 

Who had poisoned him?

Her eyes darted to the three young people gathered at the side of the grave, who she barely knew. She didn’t know how they knew her identity. Nikolai hadn’t sent them, but she’d heard of Nina Zenik, and Irina Lebedev had been genuinely shocked when she had learned Alina’s real name, which put her beyond suspicion. There was something different about the boy, but he stood looking at the grave now with a terrible conviction, something deep and empty yawning across his face. As if Mal’s death had affected him as much as it had killed Alina.

Her friends were around her, the friends who had known his true name. Genya was there, and Zoya, their heads bowed as the priest spoke slow, mournful words. Alina didn’t object when finally Iliana crawled out of her arms, and the three of them embraced – tightly, clinging onto each other. They wanted to forget that they would all die eventually too. That they’d all be taken from each other.

_If I was still Grisha, I wouldn’t need to worry about death for a long time. I’d be eternal._

She flung the thought from her mind. Was she really thinking about being Grisha now? Mal was being lowered into the ground, arms crossed, and she was still hungering after her power. She hated herself for that longing now, stronger than ever, because it had tainted their relationship the whole way through. Nothing had ever been fully whole or pure. Not with him. Not with anyone.

She watched as the last shovel of dirt was placed on his body. The man doing the work wiped his hand across his brow, the weak sunlight glinting off his shovel, the grey sky silhouetted against him, robes brown as soil flapping in the breeze as he finished putting Mal into the earth. He tilted the shovel on its side and smoothed out the overturned soil.

_I gave up everything for you. And I couldn’t even keep you._

And then Alina was sure she was having a nightmare or hallucinating, because the ground shook, and a familiar tang filled the air.

No.

There was a clap from somewhere, and darkness spilled out, blocking the faint, weak rays of the sun. Children – the children she’d tried so hard to protect – were screaming, sobbing, wailing, and yells went up from the Grisha as the few Inferni tried to illuminate the blackness. Their attempts were desperate, useless, the bright flashes of flame winking in and out of existence as quickly as they’d came.

He was here, and she knew it. She could feel his presence thrumming in her bones as if the bond between them had never been broken.  
She registered the yells.  
“Papa Mark!”  
“I’m scared!”

Zoya’s voice, close to her ear. “He’s back, Alina. This happened by the coast too.”

And then a yell that made absolutely no sense. “Kostya! Kostya, stop it!”

But it didn’t matter as Alina held her ground, pose defiant. She might not have Grisha power any more, but she was still strong. Or stubborn, at least.  
Mal would have laughed at that.

The darkness parted as if someone were drawing thin veils of lace aside, sending the inky blackness away as a pale hand parted the air like curtains. He strode into view.  
He was exactly as she remembered, and it made her breath stick in her throat as if the world had paused, made her heart stutter with pain. She’d chosen her new name after him; Aleksandra. His face was cruelly perfect, his posture straight, and he even wore a black kefta emblazoned with his insignia. He strode forward purposefully.

The children were still covered, so they couldn’t see, but a few people were exposed to the weak sunlight. Mostly Grisha. Zoya and Genya stood radiant and defiant at her side, Zoya with arms raised like a cold-eyed angel, Genya pulling a dagger of Grisha steel from her kefta. Her eyes swept the surroundings. Harshaw, Tolya, Tamar, Nikolai. And then the two girls who had come to her door the night Mal died, Irina Lebedev and Nina Zenik. Zenik’s arms were outstretched, the robes of her deep red kefta shining, but Alina could tell she was reluctant to use the bones in the graveyard to do her bidding, since she’d just attended a funeral.

“Alina.” 

Everyone recoiled at the word. So they could all see the Darkling, too. It wasn’t just one of his mind games.  
“My Alina.”  
She laughed, a bitter, broken laugh. “I do not belong to _anyone_.”

He stalked forward, those slate-grey eyes on hers, and she wondered if they’d always been filled with that strange light, if they’d always been so full of desperation and longing, if she’d always felt that she could drown in their icy depths. She felt something she hadn’t felt in so long. A pull towards him, like a physical rending of her heartstrings, an awful searing tug that ripped her bones from their casing, drawing her towards him like a magnet. She tried to keep her face impassive, to not let it show, but she felt like if she bled, the drops would float through the air to him, so powerful was that crushing feeling.

“I stabbed you; I killed you. Why are you here?”  
“I’m here,” he said, and stopped to flick a speck of invisible dust off his kefta, “for the same reason I’ve always been here, Alina. You.”

“And what army?” Zoya muttered. “Your last one failed miserably.”

The Darkling ignored her. Alina thought that Zoya might explode from sheer anger and indignation.

“You said –“ Alina’s voice quaked. “You said I was nothing. The Grisha girl you knew died on the fold. I am worthless to you. Leave us alone, Darkling.”  
He took a step too close for her liking; she could hear weapons being drawn, Grisha raising their arms, the tense breaths of people, the swish of kefta. But then again, he wouldn’t ever be close enough. She felt the need to crush him into her to ease that pull, to smash his bones into pieces against hers and bring him so tight that all the air she breathed rushed into his lungs too. She felt the power rolling off him, and thought glumly – _Mine. Power like this used to be mine._

“I was wrong, and I was blind,” he whispered. Did he just admit to a mistake? His breath grazed her face and she didn’t know what she wanted to do. Alina’s heart was a map and it was being torn into pieces, its continents split by earthquakes and landslides and volcanic eruptions, ink spilling over country borders and burrowing its way deep into the lines of her soul. She didn’t know. She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything other than the pain inside her where Mal had been – the empty longing where her power had been – the Darkling’s perfect face in front of her, from a thousand dreams, a thousand nightmares, a thousand moments spent twining her hand through the sunlight –

“You will always be one of us,” the Darkling said softly. And Alina was shaken because how could he know what Zoya had said to her? How could he?  
But he always knew me better than anyone ever did.

“No, I’m not. Look me in the eyes,” she said, straightening, “and tell me you see a Grisha. I am otkazat’sya.”  
“Tell me you never want to be Grisha again, and I’ll leave,” said the Darkling.  
“What?”  
“Tell me, Alina, Sol Koroleva. Tell me that you never wake up in the mornings and reach for your sunlight before you realise it isn’t there, and you tumble back into an empty, endless void. Tell me you don’t stare at the sun in jealousy, begging for your power back –“  
“Stop!”  
“Tell me, Alina. Or am I telling you? Am I telling you the truth of yourself, yet again? Tell me you don’t want to be Grisha.”  
“I…” How could her words change anything? And she did want it – she wanted with a fierceness so bad that sometimes it threatened to burn her down. She was suddenly glad Mal wasn’t there to see this. “I can’t.”

The Darkling – no, Aleksander – smiled then, in triumph, in sadness, in homecoming. Then he grabbed Irina and Nina, almost too fast for her to see, and clamped their hands around her wrists.

“What are you doing?” yelled the younger girl, sapphire eyes flashing in fear, bright with terror against her Suli skin. Irina screamed. “Let go of me!”

Nina was struggling similarly, but skeins of darkness held them both tightly on Alina. Alina tried to step back, to pry their hands from her wrist, but it was useless.  
And then the Darkling placed his slender fingers around her wrist, closing them like a death sentence, like a prison pardon, like the finality of a grave, and she knew it was the final step.

She felt something where there had been only a dead wasteland for years. Alina’s eyes opened in exhilaration, in disbelief, and the crowd fell back as she lit up in a glorious blaze of light, chasing away the shadows, steeping the entire scene in a golden glow. The power was a living, hungry thing inside of her that fed as it ate, and Alina felt as if wings had unfurled from her back and she was soaring through the sky. The light shined out, brilliant, otherworldly, but amongst the terrible joy was a single question: how?  
Aleksander looked triumphant, like a king triumphant after the bloodiness of battle. His hair was blown back by the sudden force, and she saw the twisted love and pride in his eyes.

_I do not belong to anyone._

She yanked her arm away and the light and surety receded, but her power was still there, refusing to shrink away. It lived in her again.  
Aleksander had brought Alina back to the light.

“What did you do?” whispered Genya, horrified, and she saw that all around, people looked the same. Their faces were carved with fear, terror, disbelief.  
“Jurda parem has changed so many things,” said the Darkling. “It is dangerous. But anything dangerous can also be a tool.”  
“This is because I took jurda parem?” Alina saw Zenik turn on the Darkling, hate and loathing simmering in those emerald-sharp eyes. “You used us.”  
“Like I said. Anything dangerous is a tool.”  
“Alina,” said Nina Zenik, “my power is to raise the dead.”  
“And the girl?” Alina jutted her chin down at Irina, who could barely be more than sixteen years old. The hazel-haired girl was straight spined, but cast her eyes around nervously as if anticipating the darkness’ return.  
“I don’t know,” mumbled Irina. “I don’t know why anyone would use me. I’m not even a good Tidemaker. I’m just an –“ Her eyes widened.

The Darkling nodded. “Someone who’s taken jurda parem and can raise the dead, and two amplifiers. I was considering three, but that didn’t work out so well last time, did it?”

He touched Alina’s face so lightly, barely grazing it with his fingertips. “You are no longer what is called a girl, Alina, and I think you know this. I will be waiting for you. There are two thrones on that dais.”

Alina sank to her knees. The ground was hard and unyielding beneath her. “You –“

Then an Inferni aimed at the Darkling, and bright flashes of flame illuminated them all. Heat singed past Alina as it surged straight for him –  
And he was gone. Ashes filtered down onto Alina’s head, and above the pensive crowd that gathered around a freshly turned grave, the sky deepened.

The sun was in eclipse.

 

＼

#### Irina

Eryk was gone.

She should have known. She could have, should have stopped him, should have recognised him for what he was.  
But he was supposed to be dead. Which begged the question: how was he still alive?

Baghra had warned them.  
＼

#### Nikolai

“Irina, Alina, and Nina,” said Nikolai as he walked beside her, his uniform still polished and perfect, even now. “You’d think it was some huge cosmic joke. Your names rhyme! We could make up songs.”

Alina’s mouth twitched up at the corners at the attempt at humour. “Everything seems to be some kind of massive joke lately.”

Nikolai stopped. They were on the border of the gardens surrounding the orphanage, and it was nearly dusk. Everything was darker – or it would be, if it weren’t for that fact that light spilled out of Alina’s hands like water, pooling around them. She couldn’t get enough of it. She didn’t think she would ever be full of enough light to make up for her time empty of it.

“Alina,” Nikolai said. His eyes shone. “I’m sorry about everything.”

“What have you got to be sorry for?” she asked, and meant it. The moments after the Darkling had left had been chaos, and Nikolai had jumped in, in his typical kingly manner, and somehow managed to organise everything while Alina still kneeled motionless on the floor, lost in a daze of shock. He’d made sure that Alina could get away to rest; he’d known how shaken she would be.

He took in a deep breath. “I’m sorry the Darkling’s still alive. I’m sorry that I don’t know how he managed it. I’m sorry that I couldn’t stop him killing Mal. ”  
“Nikolai...” She looked up at him; he was gazing at the distant tree stump. She swallowed. “That’s not your fault. I blame you for none of it.”  
“What are you doing next?” he asked her, after a moment’s pause. “Will you stay at the orphanage? Word will get out.”

She tugged on a strand of her daylight-white hair. It seemed less brittle, more vibrant, as if she’d come back into herself when using her power. As if the girl before had only been a ghost, and echo. “I don’t know. What should I do?”

He debated a moment. “Whatever you’re comfortable with, Alina.”

“That’s a kind answer, but I want advice, Nikolai. I don’t want to think too much about it. I just want to do… something.”

Nikolai dug his hands in his pockets in a very un-kinglike manner, and shrugged. “Come with me to Os Alta. With the new Grisha.”

“Irina? The Tidemaker?” Because Eryk was gone. She’d known something was off about him, but she sensed more now that he’d disappeared; Irina had said that he was an amplifier, and that meant that either he was in league with the Darkling, or… he was the Darkling, and she hadn’t noticed until he’d ruined Mal’s funeral.

“I think there’s something she knows. I think there’s something she’s not telling us.”

Alina debated a moment. “Then you should do the asking. You’re the charming one.”

“Impossible. Me, charming?”

“Improbable,” she corrected him, and he laughed sadly as they walked up the path to the orphanage together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did you catch that?  
> baghra?  
> ;);)  
> i have a lot of this written out already but i'm trying to organise it into manageable chapter chunks. i can't wait until we get to the part where the misfit dregs gang have a bigger role hint hint


	6. Give Me Your Hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was not Death, for I stood up  
> And all the Dead, lie down
> 
> \- Emily Dickinson, "It Was Not Death"

## Nina

They left for the Little Palace the next day.

Nina was staring out of the carriage window at the Ravkan forests, hopeless words trailing on the edges of her mouth, unable to speak. It was large, roomy, plush, and she fit in comfortably against the luxurious interior.

But she didn’t care how rich the outside was, because inside her heart was as frozen as a wasteland, iced shut so tight it could have been locked forever. When she closed her eyes, she could hear Matthias’ voice. _I have been made to protect you._

She didn’t like to think about the next part. _Only in death will I be kept from this oath._

“Nina?” Genya’s concerned voice floated over her. “Do you need to talk about anything?”

Nina tore her eyes away from the window, took a tiny breath, and smiled. Well, she tried to smile; usually her grins were the best, the brightest, the cockiest. Matthias had once said that the curve of her lips could light up all of Fjerda. “I’m fine.”

“Lies,” said Zoya from across the carriage, where she was seated next to Genya and Alina Starkov. Nina didn’t know how to feel about the strange, white-haired woman. She’d lost people, too, and been through so much, but Nina couldn’t help the jealousy that she felt, because Malyen Oretsev, who was supposed to be dead along with the famed Sankta Alina, had gotten a second life where Matthias hadn’t. Of course, it was entirely irrational; Mal had just died _again –_ and Nina should really stop thinking about death.

Next to her, Irina Lebedev, easily the smallest of them, shifted uncomfortably. Nina saw that the bone around Irina’s neck had started jumping around. She focused, and it stopped. The younger girl gave her a grateful smile.

“Okay, I’m not fine,” said Nina.

“That wasn’t what I asked, anyway,” pointed out Genya. “I asked if you wanted to talk.”

Nina shrugged.

To her surprise, Alina spoke up. “What did it feel like for you when it happened?”

Nina looked at her in shock. “What?”

“Did it… hurt you?” Alina was addressing both Nina and Irina now, she could see. Alina was talking about when the Darkling had used them to give Alina back her powers.

Genya looked sympathetic, and Zoya opened her mouth to say something again, but they were interrupted by the younger girl, Irina.

“No.” She shook her head of soft, tawny hazel curls. Blue eyes glinted. “It felt like I was giving something, but in a good way. Not like you were taking.” She looked to Nina. “What was it like for you?”

Nina didn’t know what to say. “I honestly don’t know. It wasn’t like using my power, before or after. It just felt like… Like I was a conductor for whatever was happening.”

Alina’s shoulders visibly deflated in relief. “I didn’t know if I’d taken something from you, or disrupted something. I don’t think anyone’s ever done that before.”

“Why would they need to?” asked Zoya. “You’re a pretty unique case, Starkov.”

Alina laughed, and Nina felt it hit her even more: the reality of a _Saint,_ sharing a carriage with her. She looked over at them. “So what do we do if the Darkling comes to the palace? Raze him down him holy power – well, light?”

Zoya shrugged. “If we thought it’d work.”

Irina leaned forwards. Her hands still played with the Saint’s bone at the hollow of her neck – which, Nina knew, was clearly fake, because Sankta Alina was sitting right in front of them. With all of her fingers. “Could another Darkling beat the first one?”

Genya’s eyebrows lifted, but it was Alina who spoke. “It would depend on the Grisha. The last one apart from him was his mother, and she…” She trailed off, and pain flashed in her eyes.

Ugh. War. Nina didn’t know how she’d cope if everyone started having traumatising flashbacks at once.

“But nobody stays dead,” said Irina, so quietly that only Nina heard, and then she was half-sure she’d imagined the words. “Not anymore.”

And then the moment was lost, because the small, curly-headed girl promptly fell asleep against the side of the carriage.

Nina half-laughed, half-sighed.

＼

## Irina

_Dreams are the only safe place to remember._

Kostya had thought she was asleep.

He’d been the one to take the watch that night, staying up under the canopy of trees and stars, whittling a lone branch with a knife he’d picked up from the last village they’d visited. She remembered the trade; he had given ten whole apples to the farmer. But they had been apples that he’d picked, and the knife was useful, anyways, so she only teased him a little.

The night was sweet, laced with the pungent smells of a dying summer. Irina was lying on her back in the thick boughs of a tree, the cooling air soft against her skin. He always made fun of her for her preference of sleeping up in the air whenever she could. _Safer than on the ground,_ she’d say when he teased her with a good-humoured smile. _Not if you fall ten feet to the ground,_ he would reply. She’d crossed her arms behind her head and focused on the sounds of the trees rustling, the birds singing their late-evening song, the sounds of Kostya whittling away at his knife below.

Then the familiar scratching noises had stopped, quickly enough that it gave Irina pause. And the forest went nearly silent, quiet enough that Irina heard Kostya’s sharp intake of breath, heard the flutter of wings. She peered over the side of her branch, camouflaged by the leaves of the tree, and had to stifle a gasp of her own.

She called it a bird for lack of a better word. It was black as a crow and about the same size, but it shifted from leathery bat-wings to gleaming raven’s feathers in the space between heartbeats. If she looked at it closely enough, she could see that it was hardly solid; it shifted states, blackness spilling from it in the air like ink, because it was formed entirely of darkness. It had landed on the branch that Kostya had been carving, and was flapping its wings incessantly.

_Run, Kostya,_ Irina wanted to yell, but something had stayed her tongue.

Then the bird opened its ebony-black beak, and instead of a caw, a woman’s voice rang out, old and astute and utterly sharp-edged. This was a bird that would take no nonsense.

“Kostya Grushov,” she said (the crow was unmistakably a strict old lady), the words seeming soft and hard at the same time from the crow’s mouth. “Are you the boy I have been looking for?”

Irina’s heart skipped a beat. What had Kostya hidden from her? Then again, she hadn’t told him that she was an amplifier, or that she had been run out of her house.

“Who are you?” was Kostya’s response. He didn’t sound afraid, just reluctant to talk, although he did hold the branch out as far as possible.

“I’m a mother who wants to help her son,” said the bird, and this time it sounded strangely sad. “I must protect the orphans, and you are an orphan, are you not?”

Kostya had shrugged, and Irina felt a pang of sorrow. Kostya didn’t like talking about his family. They had served in the First Army, and she had heard that his great-grandfather had been a great general, changing the family fortune. Before that, his great-great-grandfather had only been a carpenter.

“Why are you here?” he asked. “Why can’t you help your son without me? You look magic. I’m not even Grisha.”

“Because,” said the bird, “I am dead.”

Kostya had thrown the stick, but the old-woman-bird had only flown off it gracefully and was now swooping through the air on jet wings, twisting and turning.

“This isn’t even the Small Science,” he said. “This is magic. _Merzost._ ”

“It is neither,” snapped the creature. “It’s an old power, true, and it was not easy to do, but I have managed it. And I will fade completely without your help, because I need a living vessel to carry me.”

Irina didn’t like the sound of that. Still, she kept silent. She had the feeling that if she showed herself, the bird might disappear and never come back, and while that didn’t sound too bad… She was curious. It was probably the worst thing about herself at that point; she had to _know._

“Why would I let you do that?” Kostya half-yelled.

“My son could destroy the world. I think you quite like this world, Kostya Grushov. You could save it,” said the bird.

“Oh.”

“And if you agree, you’ll become Grisha.”

Kostya’s head snapped up. “Properly Grisha? That’s impossible. Nobody can change from normal to… Grisha.”

“I know a girl who’s changed from Grisha to otkazat’sya. And you’ll have all of my powers. And guidance.”

Kostya took a step back, thumping into the tree where Irina supposedly slept. She winced silently as a few loose leaves rained down. “Who are you? Give me your name.”

The bird sighed. She flew close to his ear and whispered it; Irina saw Kostya’s eyes widen in surprise. She itched to know what it was, but she couldn’t exactly jump down there and start demanding answers, preservation told her that much.

“Listen, Kostya,” said the bird-that-was-a-mother-without-a-name. “If you’re Grisha, they’ll let you go to the Little Palace.”

He’d nodded, and sunk down onto the floor to sit. He picked up the wood he’d been whittling; on it was a carving of the towers of Os Alta. “How do you know I want to go to the Little Palace?”

Kostya wanted to go to the Little Palace?

But why? The Little Palace didn't hold much of anything for Kostya. It was a safe haven for Grisha, where those who served in the Second Army lived and drank and ate, comfortable within theconfines of the capital city.

The crow had laughed. “So that you can be with her, of course. _She’s_ going there, and when you tell her you’re Grisha, there’s something she has that can help you with the power. She can help keep you safe. I’ll be there too, of course, but it’s better to talk to the living, don’t you think, boy?”

Kostya wanted to go to the Little Palace… because of Irina?

“It definitely is.”

“So you will help me?”

Kostya stood, and held out his arm; it seemed definitive and strange, like something Irina would have seen painted in a storybook of myth and legend, because the next moment, the bird had hopped onto Kostya’s arm with agile ease.

“This won’t hurt,” said the bird. “Just warning you.”

Kostya laughed.

Then, as Irina watched on fearfully from behind her screen of leaves and fading light, the bird had seemed to shimmer and melt into Kostya’s arm, as if a Fabrikator was pulling her apart atom by atom. Darkness slid up his forearm, but his face remained impassive, watchful, peaceful. Irina felt sure that she was about to watch her best friend be swallowed by a demon – or maybe a dark angel? She didn’t know. But the inky blackness, strangely beautiful, had swirled around him, until it reached the spot where his heart would be, and began to sink into the flesh.

Seconds had passed, seconds of empty, apprehensive quiet.

She’d watched Kostya lift his hands and gaze at them in wonder, though she could see nothing happening. Then, all at once, as if the old bird was still talking in his ear, he’d scowled and said, “I know.”

That was strange. But what happened next was stranger.

“Like this?” Kostya asked thin air, as he twitched the fingers of one hand, and darkness began to spool out, thick and stringy, in loops and whorls that made Irina dizzy to look at. “Less? Okay.” The shadows had receded, slowly at first, then faster, as if they were being sucked into Kostya. As if he were a blank hole, as if he were the empty space between the stars.

The next morning, he’d woken her up by shaking her, a huge grin on his face. “Ree!”

She groaned and turned in her sleep. “I could fall off this branch, you know, and then I’d be really grumpy. I’m bad enough as it is.”

“Irina Lebedev, I have something to show you!”

She raised an eyebrow. “Let me guess, a magical bird came to you in the middle of the night and turned you into a Grisha?”

_He’d_ nearly been the one to fall out of the tree then. “Is that a bad way to put it?”

“I was awake last night, Kos.”

“You saw Baghra?” he yelped. So that was her name.

“I saw a bird that talked like an old lady.”

Kostya smiled. “She’s in here now,” he said, tapping his temple. Irina scrambled back.

“That’s,” she panted, “a little terrifying, don’t you think?”

He shrugged. “Not really. She doesn’t talk unless I ask her to, or unless I’m about to do something really stupid.”

“So she’s talking all the time.”

“Hey!”

“And,” Irina said, swinging out of her makeshift bed, scampering down the tree and rolling up her sleeves when she hit the ground, “I have something to show you, too.”

Kostya landed squarely next to her. “What is it?”

She hadn’t been used as an amplifier by anyone but her sister. Ever. She’d never let anyone even come close to knowing what she was. But she looked into Kostya’s steely blue eyes, lit with fire and something like determination, and stretched out her palm; it was laid bare and unassuming in the scant morning light poking through the trees, gilded round with a soft yellow halo.

She took a deep breath. _I am trusting you._

“Give me your hand, Kostya.”

＼

## Nina

Irina was muttering in her sleep. Ordinarily, Nina might have been a little annoyed, but after what Irina had seen, Nina was just glad that the girl could rest at all

Across from her, Alina Starkov had her head in her hands.

“Do you pray?” asked Nina suddenly. Alina’s head snapped up, and Nina flushed all the way up her neck in embarrassment. “Sorry, I just… If you’re a Saint, do you need to pray?”

Zoya was smirking, and Genya tittered a little. Alina glared at them.

“Occasionally. Once I was stuck underground for months, with nothing to do but pray,” Alina replied. She shrugged, her white hair spilling over her shoulders. “I just do what needs to be done.”

“Most of the time, anyway,” cut in Zoya, and Alina smiled.

“I guess. Most of the time.” She looked curiously at Nina, at the black embroidery on her corecloth _kefta_. “How can you control the dead? I’ve never heard of a Corporalki who could do that.”

Nina picked at her sleeve. “I, um…”

“She took jurda parem,” cut in Genya helpfully.

“I was in a really desperate situation,” Nina clarified, “and to save some people, I took it. The cravings sucked for a while, but then again, I had a healthy supply of sweets to help me get through it.”

“And when your withdrawal was over…. You could summon…”

To demonstrate, and because she was fairly sure Irina wouldn’t mind, Nina extended her wrist. The thin, slender white bone around Irina’s neck lifted on its chain, moving through the air as Nina directed it.

Irina’s muttering paused for a moment, and then came back, slightly stronger. “You’ll go to Os Alta with me?”

Alina’s eyes were trained on the shadowy bone in a kind of disturbing way. “Is that a Saint’s bone?”

Zoya grimaced. “One of yours, apparently. Sankta Alina’s finger bone.”

Alina cringed. “Don’t call me that.”

“If you wanted babying, why are you coming with us to the Little Palace?” Zoya raised an eyebrow at her.

“I… missed the décor?”

Genya snorted. “Who are you? Alina Starkov would never say such a thing.”

Nina realized that she was practically an outsider here. Sure, she knew Zoya and Genya from her missions and work in the Second Army, but Alina Starkov, no matter how many stories she’d heard about her, was still a complete stranger. Nina didn’t know how she was supposed to feel about it all. On the one hand, she was sitting opposite a legendary Grisha (although Nina herself had been called legendary a few times); on the other hand, it was disconcerting to know that you could lose your powers that easily. And of course, looking at Alina made her resentful that Matthias was dead. She didn’t want to remember burying him, her fingers frozen blue in the Fjerdan north, watching his body lowering into the ground so that he could be with Djel. But she did. She remembered the words she’d muttered in Fjerdan, tear tracks solidifying on her face. She had almost sung. Matthias would have loved that.

Nina realized she’d been staring and closed her eyes, leaning against the sides of the carriage, even though it was so bumpy over these rural roads that she’d probably knock herself out accidentally on the walls. Behind the cool darkness of her eyelids, it was easy to focus on her thoughts; she barely registered Zoya’s sharp voice and Genya’s quick remarks as she felt through the world, seeking with her power. It was comforting to do that sometimes, to run her hand through the silken waters of Death, as eerie as it sounded. Because it was part of her now. There was a deadness in her, but it had made something new come alive.

She could feel every inch of Irina’s bone; she could feel the possibility of ending that hovered on everyone’s exhaled breaths. She could feel the thousands of cells dying every minute, every particle fading from life. She could feel the bone handles of a knife in Genya’s pocket. She could feel their consistency; she could feel –

Her eyes snapped open. “Stop the carriage.”

Zoya’s answer was quick as gunfire. “Why.” Not a question, but a demand.

“There is something dead out there. Something old, and dark, and it’s moving around through the trees, following us.”

Zoya opened the window and yelled something to the driver, and the carriage came to a slow stop as the horses adjusted. Nina poked her head out and looked back; sure enough, the carriage carrying the King and several other Grisha was easing to a halt too, the clattering of the horses’ hooves gradually fading.

At some point, Irina had awoken; the small girl, tiny for a fifteen-year-old, rubbed furiously at her eyes for about three seconds; then she sat up ramrod-straight, noting the tense expressions on all the other Grisha’s faces. “What’s wrong?”

Nina held up a hand for her to be quiet, focusing. The deadness that was following them felt… ancient, older than anything she had ever felt, and its lifelessness seemed to call to her from across the void of empty space. “There’s something dead outside. Moving when it isn’t supposed to be. Following us.”

A rustle from the trees. Guards outside drew their guns, and Nina looked at the four other Grisha. “I’m going outside.”

“Nina -“ Genya started.

“I’m the only person here who can speak to the dead. I’m going.” She had been careful before, and it hadn’t made any difference. Matthias was still dead. Besides, she was confident in her own power. She’d raised armies of skeletons before; she could handle this. Nina would wear her death like a crown and her pain like a shield, and she would overtake anything that came her way.

Even if she’d never seen anything like it. Nothing dead moved around like that, not unless she willed it to. The idea that there might be someone out there with the same powers as hers, using death against her, rubbed against her skin angrily.

She swung her legs over the side of the carriage. A second later, she heard a thump beside her, and to her surprise, Alina Starkov was there too, arms raised, glowing with Grisha light.

“If you’re going to risk your life,” she said, “you might as well let us help you.”

It was easy to see why people believed Alina had died on the Shadow Fold. Her personality type was probably “martyr”.

She felt the crunch of mud under her boots, and stepped further onto the grass that edged the woods. She could feel its presence there – large, buzzing like a fly in her ear, calling to her.

_Nina. Nina._

She heard Matthias’ voice in its whispered feverishness, and knew that whatever it was, she had been right. It was definitely a dead thing, walking the earth when it shouldn’t be.

She heard more footsteps behind her, but didn’t turn to check who it was. Raising her arms high, Nina braced herself, feeling the thing move closer and closer, feeling its age like ruins in a forgotten city.

“Nina,” a voice cautioned from behind her. Zoya. She ignored it.

“Come out,” she called cautiously into the tree line. The branches seemed to press closer together, whispering, conferring. And then something dark moved, impossibly fast, at the edge of her vision. She let out a quick, short, exhalation, letting power fill her veins.

That was it. The dead thing.

And then she saw a cloud of darkness, forming impossibly stark and black amongst the trees, rising like coils of smoke. It was eternal, it was terrible and captivating, it was the bleak and empty space between the stars. Nina couldn’t control this; it wasn’t death. It was nothingness. Pure absence.

A yell from behind, and she recognized one of Alina’s sunbeams attempting to cut through it. Nina backed up several steps and waited for the darkness to recede.

It didn’t.

Instead, it only sucked in the light, growing deeper and darker, fuller and stronger.

“It’s him. It must be.” Zoya’s voice was steely, cool, determined, Filled with resolve. “Finish it, Alina. Use the Cut.”

Alina raised her arm, and a dark, birdlike figure seemed to form in the misty cloud of shadow, watching them, daring them. Nina had never seen anything like it before.

And she had almost never been as shocked as when Irina screamed. She whirled, and Alina was momentarily distracted, lowering her arm in confusion.

“Oh my saints! Kostya, you idiot!” And then nobody was fast enough to stop Irina as she sprinted, curls bouncing, mad determination in her jewel-hard eyes, into the blackness.

Genya turned to Zoya. “If she dies, she’s your responsibility. Etherealki.”

＼

## Irina

Irina was sprinting running racing over the rough ground, feeling her hair come undone, feeling branches snap at her and rocks stick into her feet and not caring, not caring at all. Because Kostya was in there – somewhere in that darkly swirling cacophony. She’d known it from the moment she’d seen the bird fly out of it. Ignoring the frightened shouts from behind her, she plunged headfirst into the darkness.

It was not as big as it seemed, and the ebony coolness around her was not as frightening, either. It ran velvet fingers down her arms, breathed soft promises in the gaps between strand of hair, smiled at her though she couldn’t see. The dark did not harm her. It knew her, after all; she’d helped Kostya learn how to summon it in the first place.

She knew that she wouldn’t be able to see or hear anything from the outside now that she was in here; all the sound had faded away until there was nothing but this, this solitude. It was a safety bubble from the rest of the world.

When Kostya had first shown her his newfound powers that day he'd thought that Irina would be frightened, biting his lip as if afraid she’d run away. But she’d laughed at it instead, fascinated, cupping the inky whorls in her hands. She drew on the strength of those memories now.

Now, she needed to focus. Now, she needed to be strong. Irina would cut through the darkness if she wanted - she believed she cold tear it apart with sheer will, if just to find Kostya.

“Kos?” Her voice was jarringly loud in the bleak silence. Then she heard a scuffle, and the dark seemed to surge towards her. She reminded herself not to flinch and instead ran her hands through it as easily as if it were liquid; it felt like silk against her fingers. _Water. That’s good. Imagine it’s water. You’re a Tidemaker, after all._

“Ree?” It was tentative and broken, but there. That was her Kostya’s voice, warm and crashing all at once, like a sunset-tinged wave greeting the shore, like the smooth flow of a satin river through a moonlit cave.

And then someone crashed into her, someone achingly familiar; he even smelled the same, like spices and apples, wood and earth and the musky jasmine of the power he summoned. He was hugging her, holding her so tight, as if he could hold onto her forever, or like he was trying to make sure all of the broken, jagged pieces of her stayed together. And she was doing the same; her heart burst as she gripped onto him as if she were drowning and he was her only chance of survival.

And when he spoke again, she thought she was wrong. She wasn’t drowning. No, they were both survivors of shipwrecks, kicking towards land together with every string of hoping in their beings.

“Irina. Ree. You found me. You came for me.”

“Don’t be daft. I came for the apples,” she said, choking on a broken laugh. “I would kiss you, but I can’t even see your face in here.”

The darkness flitted away a little, leaving them in a very small, very poorly illuminated bubble; the tiniest prick of sunlight shone in from above them, so that they were cocooned in a shell of swirling shadows. With the light came faint voices, but Irina had waited long enough to find Kostya that she wasn’t hurrying. Even in the soft half-light, she could make out his features: the blue eyes, levels lighter than hers, the shape of his jaw, the slight wave to his blonde hair. It was him, it was really him, and she found tears streaking down her face.

“How about now?” he teased, smiling faintly. “Will you kiss me now it’s not so dark?”

She smirked and punched his arm lightly. “Dream on.”

“Where did you go?” Kostya took her in, the leaves in her hair, the circles under her eyes. “What happened to you when I left to fight the volcra in the cave?”

“They were _volcra?_ ” Volcra were a horrifying type of winged, monstrous beasts that Irina had thought were extinct. If she closed her eyes, she could still hear their inhuman screeches, feel the fear that had shuddered through her as she'd run away from them as fast as her legs would carry her.

“I’ll explain later. But it’s been weeks since I’ve seen you. I thought….” Kostya drew in a deep, rattling breath. “I thought you were dead.”

“I almost was,” she said, flinching. “After I escaped the cave, I got stuck on a slaver’s ship. But then Inej Ghafa rescued me. Oh, and I ended up in Ketterdam – which smells – and then I came back to Ravka, for you and my sister Anastasiya, but then something happened, and a guy I thought was called Eryk is actually the Darkling - remember him? He's an evil Grisha conqueror who everyone thought was dead - and Sankta Alina isn’t dead at all, and…” Irina looked up at him. “Oh! I’m going to the Little Palace now. I’m a Tidemaker, apparently. What else?”

Kostya stared at her, mouth slightly open, and started to laugh.

“You’ve never been boring a day in your life, have you?” he retorted.

“The Triumvirate are outside. And King Nikolai.” Irina shrugged.

“Anything else?”

“I learned how to play the balalaika.”

“Really?” He leaned forwards. “Can you play ‘Oh When The Suli Saints Come Martyring Themselves?’”

She sighed. “I can’t really play the balalaika. That’s the only thing I was joking about.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t be too disappointed,” she half-grinned. “I’ll still sing your martyr songs for you, if you like.”

“I’m grateful.”

“Is Baghra here?” she inquired. Baghra was the name of the shadowbird who had given Kostya his powers in return for residency in his body and the promise that he would try and help her save her son. Sometimes, Baghra spoke to him in his head. At other times, she disappeared.

“No. She was a minute ago, but… everything else melts away when I’m with you.”

Irina was momentarily stunned at his words, and felt a slow blush creep up her cheeks. ”I’ve missed you, Kos-Kos.”

“I could say the same for you, Lebedev.”

She glanced up at the tiny fissure of light in the ceiling of the makeshift, coal-coloured dome. “We should probably go outside. They’ll be going insane.”

“Will they attack me?” Kostya didn’t sound afraid, just wary. Uncertain.

“Not if I show them you’re with me. I’m going to _make_ them give you a place at the Little Palace. Come on,” she said. Then Irina tiled her head and smiled, blown through by memory.

“Give me your hand, Kostya.”

He did.

＼

## Wylan

Wylan leaned over a dingy table in the Slat, listening with narrowed eyes. His fingers drummed an irregular pattern on the rough wooden surface, his other hand resting loosely on top of Jesper’s.

“Scheming face,” he heard Inej whisper to Jesper. Jesper muttered something back that Wylan couldn’t hear, and the two of them burst into giggles.

“This is exactly what Nina said?” asked Kaz from across the table. His gloves were off, in a small pile in front of him. Wylan stole a glance at Inej, and the faint smile on her face suddenly dropped at Kaz’s words.

“Here. You can look at the letter if you don’t believe me,” she offered, sliding a thin sheet of paper towards Kaz; he left it where it was on the table, reading it from a distance. If Wylan focused hard, he could make out several different shapes, and tried running through the letters like Jesper had taught him. _Palace. Ravka. Death._

Kaz looked up, expressionless, hardness set into his sharp-angled face. “And she expects us to help? If there’s no money involved, Inej, why would I? I’m not Ravkan, and even if I was, I’m no patriot.”

Inej rolled her eyes. Wylan suppressed a smile at the sight; people didn’t often roll their eyes at Kaz and get away with it. “The Ravkan crown pays well. And if a war starts between Ravka and Kerch, there’ll be much less pigeons for you to pick off. You might even,” her mouth quirked, “be conscripted.”

Next to Wylan, Jesper snorted. Wylan agreed. He couldn’t imagine Kaz in a soldier’s uniform, following orders from some red-faced middle-aged general.

Then again, Kaz would probably end up _being_ a general if he was ever in the army. Kaz Brekker didn’t appreciate being told what to do.

Kaz was silent a moment, considering, but nothing showed on his face, as per usual. Wylan knew for certain that Kaz would never let himself be conscripted - that Inej's words were just for show. But after a heartbeat, Kaz's gaze flicked to Inej's eyes. “What does she want us to do?”

“Be ready,” Inej said.

“We’re always ready for anything,” cut in Jesper, affronted.

“I’m not,” volunteered Wylan helpfully. Kaz glared at him, but the full force of Kaz’s angry, demeaning looks had been lost on Wylan a while ago.

But then he watched Kaz’s cold expression shift from annoyance into contemplativeness; he propped his hand up under his jaw, a twitch working.

“This is what we’re going to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> scheming face! thank you so much for reading so far <3


	7. The Orphan's Shadow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I go from loving to not loving you,  
> From waiting to not waiting for you  
> My heart moves from cold to fire.
> 
> \- Pablo Neruda
> 
> \---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the last chapter was a little confusing but at least kostya and irina are reunited now :)

## Alina

“No!” Alina felt the word dragged from her lips as if by an invisible hand as she watched Irina run straight into the darkness. She took a step closer, brimming with light, and shuddered.

It felt like shadows, like the end of the world. It felt familiar, cold, deep. It felt like the Shadow Fold.

But it didn’t feel like the Darkling, Aleksander.

“Nina,” she called back to the steely-eyed girl in a scarlet _kefta._ “You said it’s a dead thing walking. Can you control it?”

Alina’s hair was blown back by a kind of chill wind floating off the stain of darkness, and she had to push it out of the way as she watched Nina raise her arms, eyes closed tight. There was an eerie focus on the girl’s face, nothing like she’d ever seen with Corporalki before. Did Nina even count as a Corporalki? Whatever the case, there was something strange and unsettling about her, like the bright, smiling girl had faded into another world.

Tense silence from the people gathered around her, and then Nina lowered her wrists, regret written on her face, and a little terror too, as she gazed after the darkness. Irina was in there somewhere. “I can’t. It’s dead, but like nothing dead that I’ve ever seen before. There’s enough life in it to keep me out.”

“We can’t just wait for Irina to die,” argued Zoya.

“That would not be ideal,” agreed David. Alina was still getting used to hearing all their voices again, so often. The memories sometimes struck her like lightning, as if thunderstorms had been released from a jar.

“Alina, try the light again,” said Nikolai. “Whatever’s in there with the girl could use a sunnier disposition.”

Alina sighed and wasted a whole second glaring at him for the awful joke, while a couple of guards laughed uncomfortably. She let light gather in her hands, feeling its soft warmth trail over her skin, the colour of butter and honey and humid summer days. Closing her eyes, she thrust her arms out, sending all that light, all that power, barrelling towards the darkness.

She felt even stronger than before, and she wasn’t even wearing any amplifiers. Power coursed through her like horses over a dusty racetrack.

And all of that power was wasted, as the light was merely absorbed by the shadowy inkiness.

“Do we start praying now?” Alina asked exasperatedly, and then cursed herself for saying it. Some of these people had thought she was a Saint.

“I’ll get the Apparat,” said Nikolai less than cheerfully. She had the distinct feeling it was supposed to be a joke, but it came out defeated.

As it turned out, there was no need for him. Barely a second later, the shadows stared shifting, convulsing like mad things, skittering away, folding in on themselves. Alina took an involuntary step back and almost knocked David over.

“Sorry,” she muttered, but she was watching the ebony oilspill as it petered away –

And was replaced by a shimmering wall of blue water.

“What in the name of all the Saints?” muttered Zoya. She glanced at Alina. “Well, the real Saints, anyway. Irina Lebedev is summoning.”

And she was. Beyond the iridescent sapphire and sparkling cerulean behind the slipping shadows, Alina could make out the slender, willowy girl, tawny gold-chestnut curls untouched by the water. One of her arms was raised as she summoned, twisting in arcs. And by her side was another figure, one that Alina didn’t recognise.

In front of her, Nina recoiled. “That’s it. That’s the dead one.”

Irina and the dead person started to move towards them, still surrounded by a thick veil of shifting watery hues, and every person drew their breath. Then the petite girl yelled something, surprisingly calmly.

“Promise not to hurt him.”

“I don’t think that’s the Darkling with her,” David said. “He wouldn’t feel the need for protection.”

“We won’t hurt him,” Alina called back.

“I’d rather like an explanation, though,” added Nikolai.

“Kings and their ridiculous demands,” muttered Zoya.

“The king heard that,” countered Nikolai. “You should apologise.”

“Shut up,” said Zoya, pushing past him, hair and kefta flying behind her as she ran to Irina. Her wrists twisted, and Alina felt the air shift around her, sensed the hum of Grisha power. Sometimes it was like feeling the heartbeat at the core of the world.

Irina was coming closer now, and Alina could glimpse the figure next to her; shadows flitted up and down his arms, wreathing his features, but she caught little glimpses: sunlight on white-blonde hair, the glimmer of eyes the same colour as Irina’s water. She thought she saw the corner of a bird’s wing swooping down, dark beyond the wall of aquamarine.

Slowly, the water began to recede, and fog laced the ground. Zoya lifted her arms and blew it away. Alina chanced a look back at the company behind her. She saw grim faces and anticipation.

_You will always be one of us._

“Irina?” Alina called. “Who is it?”

“My name,” said the boy, shadow melting off him, a strange, different kind of light blazing from his aquamarine eyes, “is Kostya.”

Nikolai cleared his throat.

Kostya looked at him; Alina saw his eyes travel up the king’s face and rest on the crown adorning Nikolai’s head. He paled and stumbled to one knee. Nikolai must have been feeling strange, but did not show it, as he nodded to Kostya.

“Rise.”

Kostya looked up, uncertain. “Are you sure? I, um, I kind of feel more comfortable down here.”

“Oh, for Saints’ sake,” huffed Irina, dragging him to his feet. “Get a grip. None of you are killing him,” she added, glaring around at everyone.

Alina stifled a laugh, but next to her, she could see Nina’s emerald eyes narrowing.

“What _are_ you?” Nina called out. “How does Irina know you? And why do you feel so dead?”

Kostya looked incredibly uncomfortable, wringing his hands narrowly. “I...”

“He’s not dead,” cut in Irina. “But Baghra is.”

 

Alina felt as if someone had slapped her around the face. “Baghra –“

“Kostya,” announced, King Nikolai, striding forwards, “you’re coming with me.”

## Kostya

Baghra was in his head again.

 _So dramatic. Was there really a reason for that?_  she sighed, her voice so like inky wings flapping against the walls of his mind.

“Please, just be quiet,” he muttered under his breath, making his words inaudible to those around him, who watched him with keen eyes. Irina cast a sidelong glance at him as they made their way to King Nikolai’s carriage. Of course, she’d stay with him the whole time.

While he faced the king. The king. Kostya couldn’t believe it, could barely keep his hands from the gloves that were said to cover gruesome battle scars.

He inhaled deeply, trying to make this seem lees like a dream and more like reality. As he was led into the plush richness of the overly decorated carriage, his eyes took everything in – the Grisha around him in their multi-coloured kefta, eyes alight with suspicion, the otkazat’sya guards in strict formation – and he gulped.

_Stay strong, boy. This is the course I have chosen you for._

Sometimes, he regretted taking Baghra’s offer. When she’d told him that he needed to save the world from her son, he hadn’t quite imagined that her son was the Darkling, the most feared man in Ravka. Possibly in the world.

Then again, this was probably the most he’d ever do with his life.

He sat down on the plush velvet seat, Irina close beside him. Opposite him, the king slid elegantly into the seat, with two more Grisha – a Squaller and a woman with white hair – opposite him. If it had been an ordinary carriage, they might have been squashed, Kostya guessed, but this was roomy and luxurious enough to fit them all comfortably.

“You know, I never asked you to enter,” Nikolai said to Irina, and Kostya bristled a little. He didn’t trust these people, not really, and it was only Baghra’s sternness in his head that kept him from grabbing Irina and running into the woods.

Saints, he had missed her. He snuck a glance at her again, at her deep brown terracotta skin and jewel-like eyes, and it was like coming up for air, like a glass of cold water. She made him awake. She made him alive, even when he felt that the deadness inside him consumed him. Even when it ate at him a little every day, an abyss that his mortality tumbled into piece by piece.

Irina bowed her head a little, but her voice was as strong as steel when she replied. “My king, I do not wish to be disrespectful, but I’ve been separated from Kostya for weeks, and he needs me.”

 _He needs me._ The words were the most simple – and the most complex – kind of truth.

Sure, he needed Irina. He’d barely been able to sleep the past few weeks. Without her face, without her surety and easy smiles, he’d slowly been crumbling apart, but Baghra had always been there. The mother and grandmother he’d never had. Except she was a bird made of death and darkness living somewhere in his skull.

“Oh, let them be, Nikolai, you pompous pig,” scolded the white-haired woman, and Kostya’s jaw almost dropped open. Wasn’t there some kind of rule against speaking to the king like that?

 _Don’t you know who she is?_ Baghra’s voice floated around in his skull, irritatingly quiet and contemplative.

Oh.

_Oh._

The white-haired woman looked almost exactly as Baghra had shown Kostya: in his dreams, in his visions, in his hours both waking and sleeping while he’d pined after Irina. She’d shown him memory after memory, told him what he needed to do to save her son and the world.

He was looking at a living Saint. At Alina Starkov. She examined him through large, red-rimmed eyes, and he wondered if she’d been crying recently.

“You’ve lost too much weight,” he said suddenly, and then clapped his hand over his mouth. Alina’s mouth fell open a little, and then he hastily amended, “At least, that’s what Baghra says. Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t mean –“

“That does sound incredibly like Baghra,” said Tsar Nikolai, leaning forward ever so slightly so that Kostya could see the exact details of his face – the clever eyes, the fox-like features, the imperialistic manner and regality that he guessed came with ruling over a kingdom. “Tell me, Kostya...” He let the name hang.

“Grushov,” filled in Irina. “His full name is Kostya Grushov.”

“Like the general?” asked the Tsar, and Kostya nodded quickly. He could feel Baghra laughing at him.

“Well, Kostya Grushov,” interrupted the raven-haired Squaller. “Tell us what’s happened.”

As he told them, the sky outside the windows eventually darkened, afternoon sun fading to streaky sunset fading to the deepness of evening. He told them the whole story: how after his grandfather, the great general Havel Grushov, had died, his parents had been sucked down into a deep pit of sadness, how they had been stoned to death after people had found out who his great-grandfather was: a carpenter by the name of Maxim Grushov, a monster who had hunted the helpless and been killed by his greed and wickedness in the end. He hadn’t wanted to stay tied to that place, because general’s grandson or not, he was descended from a monster. And townspeople didn’t like monsters.

So he had run.

He’d heard rumours that he might have had distant family, but he couldn’t be sure they’d take him in – couldn’t be sure of anything. And that was how Kostya Grushov had ended up trekking through the woods on his way to a new city, a city where he could try and wash away the taint from his past. And then he’d met Irina, and then Baghra.

He felt a fluttering under his skin, and his power teased at him. Baghra seemed to be whispering to him. _Use it, use it, spread blackness into the air like tongues of fire and watch them realise the truth._

Kostya’s fingers wiggled a little, and from his fingertips shot a skein of night-black. It wove itself up, up, through the air, like a dancer spinning and floating on wings of shadow. Sankta Alina gasped and clamped a hand to her mouth, and he saw why.

Out of its own volition, the shadow deepened and thickened, gaining mass and weight. It grew so real that it turned to a strange, charcoal bird, with cunning eyes and a sharp beak. The bird's eyes were like an abyss that you could fall into forever, empty and unending, and its wings were midnight black - strikingly so. It hopped onto Kostya’s hand, and he lifted his arm.

“I am Baghra,” said the bird simply, looking Alina in the eyes.

“But... How?” Alina asked, trembling, though it didn’t seem to be with fear – more like anticipation. She extended her hand warily to touch the shadow, and Kostya saw her shiver in recognition as her finegrs brushed its charcoal silk. She closed her eyes. He knew what she was remembering – what Baghra had told him, anyway.

“You saw me fall. You never saw me die,” the bird stated simply. “When you live for so long, tread so many paths, you learn things that ordinary mortals would not. I am a Grisha, child, a drüsje, a witch. I left my body smashed on those rocks for my foolish, ambitious son to see.” The bird, despite its cruelly cut beak, seemed to smile a little. “I watched him weep over me. It is good to know that he was not entirely forsaken. And this kept me sustained enough until I found another living vessel.”

“The boy was your vessel,” whispered King Nikolai, looking Kostya in the eyes. Kostya nodded and looked at him straight back. He wasn’t surprised at what he saw – a leader, a scarred man, a privateer.

“And my son wants it all back. All of it,” continued Baghra in her cutting voice. “The whole world. But I am afraid that more than anything, he wants her.”

Alina sat straight up, her back going rigid like a wooden plank. “He wants me?”

The bird inclined its head. Kostya shivered in his seat.

 

Sankta Alina had fire, unyielding and blinding as daylight, in her eyes. She sucked in a breath, and replied,

"Well, it is wanting that makes us weak."

## Kaz

He arrived at the Slat, cane in hand, his bad leg aching a little after such a day. He’d been all over the Barrel, sorting out troublemakers, rounding up people who refused to pay their dues.

He was building his empire, piece by piece. Brick by brick.

The Slat was warm, and familiar faces greeted him at every turn, but his mind was on something else tonight. How could he pull off what Inej and Ravka asked of him? He didn’t owe anything to anyone – certainly not Ravka.

But he did owe Inej. And not just because they’d saved each other’s lives. He owed her for the little things, the brief embraces and glances and the way his heart thudded uncomfortably when she was around. The smiles. She sometimes felt like the only real thing in the world to him.

And she wasn’t around right now.

He exhaled, a long slow breath that filled the emptiness of the air around him as he reached his room. There, on the bed, lay something that gave him pause. Made the constant tattoo of footsteps and crow on the worn floors come to a pause.

He reached it, picking it up gingerly, turning it over; it was another letter, but the envelope was written on in Inej’s looping, precise handwriting. A quick flick of a pocket-knife sliced open the thin paper with a sharp tearing noise, and something fell out onto the ground: something hard, shiny and metallic.

Kaz picked up the strange fragment, and scanned the letter with a detached disinterest. He allowed himself one small, dark smile, pocketed the shard, and tossed the letter into the fire. It smelled of seawater and darkness, and it let out a dark cloud of smoke like thorns.

Yes, that could work.

That could work very well indeed.

 

## Alina

The next time she saw Aleksander, she was outside the gates of the Little Palace. The royal convoy had arrived with pomp, splendour and a grand welcome, just as Nikolai had liked it. She smiled wryly to herself; some things never changed. But she was grateful for this time, because it was the last time she’d been truly alone in a while.

She felt strange, a star out of place in a constellation. Everything around her was disorientating; she hadn’t been here in years, and at the sight of the great spires stretching themselves long over the vast skies, at the sight of the bedecked and jewelled palace and the unnaturally beautiful gardens, something in her opened sleepy eyes. Yawned and gaped wide.

The rare feeling of peace was suddenly jolted from her when she saw a dark crop of hair from behind a tree.

She took a breath. It was probably a servant, or another Grisha, or one of the many guards or nobility. She would just go and have a look, just to be sure. She was still learning how to be brave again, now that she was away from the steady comfort of Mal; she hadn’t realised how much he’d made her depend on him. She was finding her own two feet again, and she liked it.

The freedom.

It was exhilarating.

Then she turned the corner, and something tugged at the edges of her mind, something dark and shadowy, something that inexplicably pulled her around to face a pair of shining slate eyes.

She was not the same girl she had been before. She would not run or cower. She knew exactly what she wanted, and she would get it.

Alina closed her eyes, speaking to thin air. “I don’t want you here right now.”

In a heartbeat, she felt a presence closer to her, and the shell of a whisper passed her ears. It was hot but strangely comforting, and where it brushed her, she could barely suppress a shiver.

“As you wish.”

She opened her eyes slowly, as if unwrapping a present with careful hands, and blinked, feeling nothing but emptiness where she was sure the Darkling had been before. It took a second for her to comprehend what had happened.

Alina had given him an order. And Aleksander, the Darkling, had obeyed.

She wondered how many people were left in the world that he would obey.

Maybe it was only her that was left; maybe she was the only one that could control him. She stood there, blinking, blinded by the light.

The spell was broken suddenly when she heard the passing chatter of courtiers, light as birdsong and careless and free. She realised that she had been caught up in him again, pushed into believing something that he’d wanted her to. He would expect her to keep this a secret, to hide it deep somewhere in her heart, to never show anyone because of her fear and her attachment to Mal, so soon after his death.

Mal's death. Once again, Aleksander had taken something that was hers.

A wire, taut and tense in her chest, snapped, and a dam came flooding forth.

Anger starting to pool in her fists, she strode out of the gardens, thunder in her eyes and her hair streaming behind her like a banner of war. Alina stalked down corridors, ignoring those who gaped at her, and she flounced up, up staircases, her feet smacking loudly into the floor. She was not running; she wanted to make that clear. She would not hide.

She would retaliate.

People jumped back as she slammed open the door in one of the highest dome-shaped towers, striding through with purpose and intent. The meeting was small, and they recovered quickly when they saw who she was: it was Nikolai, stooped with the weight of an invisible crown on his head, several Grisha, and some commanders that had been deemed fit for the meeting. Alina herself had been invited, even cajoled to go, but she had refused, preferring an hour of peace and silence. Now she saw that was a mistake.

Would her life ever be peaceful again?

It wouldn’t if she didn’t change it, if she didn’t change the world, the way things were. She would make herself a reckoning.

“He visited again,” Alina said, and she saw Nikolai’s expression shift from surprised and taken aback to wary and calculating.

“The Darkling visited the palace?” yelped one of the human commanders.

Alina turned cold eyes on him and shook her head regally, concisely. The commander cowered back and held his head low in deference, waiting for her to say more.

“What a queen,” Kostya whispered to Irina from the back of the room. Everyone heard Baghra’s snort.

“He visited in spirit. I had thought that his bond with me was broken, but he is using it again,” Alina replied coolly. Her voice was like a blade.

“So it seems, Alina,” said Nikolai, and there was tiredness in his voice. “We were discussing sending out search parties –“

“Who is leading them?” questioned Alina, and it sounded more like a demand than a question, even to her own ears. She wondered to herself what had come over her to spur her to such a decisive tone.

But she knew. In her heart of hearts, she knew. The love she had once felt for Mal – the sadness and terror in his death, and the calm sleepiness that had come from living with him – all this was washed away by the sheer, undulating rage that now filled every crevice in her heart.

She would not let Aleksander hurt her, manipulate her, kill those she loved, again.

“I am assembling units as we speak,” mumbled one of the human commanders.

“I will lead them. I will search for him myself,” said Alina, and nobody dared bother arguing with her. She took a seat at the table, tossed back her long white hair, and sat upright and strong as she motioned for the meeting to continue. The time for learning how to be brave was gone, and now she was at war.

Somewhere in the back of the room, Irina half-smiled at Kostya wryly. “Yes,” she agreed. “A queen.”

 

 


	8. Destinations and Destinies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in the end, cold crows piece together  
> the night: a black map  
> I've come home—the way back  
> longer than the wrong road  
> long as a life
> 
> \- Black Map by Bei Dao
> 
> \--  
> angst, crows, wesper, submarines, irina, alina, nikolai

## Nina

Nina lay on her back in the cool night of the Little Palace, her eyes open, scanning the familiar darkness above her. The heated summer had long since faded into crisp autumn, and the scent of dying things wafted in on the breeze through her window, bringing with it the tinge of power that everything seemed to be imbued with here in the heart of the Grisha.

This was where she belonged. She could feel it in her bones. This was her home.

And yet, it was being threatened. Nina would do whatever it took to protect her country from the man who had threatened to take it once, and she was determined to fight. Matthias had been right. She was a Grisha soldier born and bred from the start, and Ravka was the blood in her veins.

She remembered her promise to him, too. The forgiveness. The peace. The love. She would need to help those in Fjerda – those who struggled with their hate and bigotry. But how could she do that if she was here, cloistered in a palace, waiting for the Darkling to arrive and slaughter them all?

Slowly, she slipped out of bed. The covers slid off her; she looked down and noted happily that she’d gained back most of the weight that she’d lost after her battle with parem. Nina had been frightened that the physical effects of it would stay with her forever, but she felt more herself again than she had in an age.

The moonlight filtered down, illuminating dust motes, as she carefully wrote two letters, the ink scarring deep lines into the paleness of the paper. One would stay here, at the Little Palace, explaining her absence. The other she sealed tight, inking Inej’s name on the back.

She didn’t have much to pack. A few kefta and ordinary clothes, some money so that she could survive, and some things of Matthias’ that she hadn’t been able to bear to part with. She didn’t want to tear herself apart from him. She didn’t want to heal. She wanted him to stay inside her, in her blood and under her skin, for forever, if need be. He would always have a home in her.

Matthias. Nina felt a lone tear roll down her cheek now that nobody was here to see her. Only the moonlight bore witness.

She hefted up her back and walked quietly through the corridors, her muscles aching with restlessness, but her senses telling her to stay and take in the palace for the last time. It could well be the last time she saw it.

The letter for Inej was handed to a messenger, who bowed hastily. And so Nina Zenik began to walk the long, long path away from the Little Palace, away from the King, towards what Matthias had made her promise.

And the sun rose the next morning on an Os Alta that still had the same turrets, the same shops, the same people smiling and waving to each other from their windows.

Soon, it would be a city forever changed.

## Inej

Inej ducked the blade, twisting her assailant’s arm and sending him careening into the dimly lit wall of the dirty alleyway. She was barely out of breath, but the big, burly man was panting heavily. Scowling, she reached for the knife at her belt and slashed one of his hands where it still lay against the wall. Blood, shining dark and viscous in the dim gaslight, started to sputter out of his cut.

“The next time you try to force yourself on someone, remember this,” she snarled, shoving him to the ground. He looked up at her, hurt and resentment and privileged anger in his eyes.

He was a mercher, or a mercher’s son, or someone of equal wealth. Someone equally clueless, who believed he was better than everyone else; someone who didn’t care about the feelings of others enough that he’d assault them in an alleyway.

“I’ll have you for this, you ugly, worthless prostitute,” he called out after her, and Inej laughed darkly to herself. He would not, could not have her.

She was worth more than that.

“What did you call her?”

Inej tensed at the familiar, rasping voice that emanated from the shadows.

“This isn’t a good time, Dirtyhands,” she called, not looking at where she knew Kaz was leaning against the corner. “I took care of it.”

“Dirtyhands?” The rich man paled. Then he sneered. “What does Dirtyhands want with some ugly, scrawny, stupid whore? Probably he wants to grab you for himself –“

The man went silent. A crow’s cane had thudded into his head, and it hit him again, squarely in the face, as his neck made an awful snapping noise. And then Kaz was there, turning the man’s body over, tossing a bloodied wallet to Inej.

Inej sighed, finally looking at him. He stepped away from the slumped body, an ugly look on his face,  but he smoothed his expression out when he locked eyes with Inej.

“Scum deserved it,” he said nonchalantly.

“And you don’t think I could handle it?” she asked.

“You handled it fine,” said Kaz airily. “No doubt about that.”

“Why are you here?” she asked him finally, stepping closer to him in the circle of gaslight.

He flicked an invisible piece of dirt off his immaculate sleeve. “I was just strolling.”

“So why is Jesper here too?”

Above them both, Jesper cursed, and then jumped to the ground – not gracefully, but as well as he could manage. “Inej,” he said, offering his hand mockingly.

She rolled her eyes. She looked at Kaz again; there was an excitement to him that was unmissable, even with the recent altercation, a quickening of his jaw, a slight buzz under his skin. She knew why.

“You got the letter?” She quirked an eyebrow at Kaz.

A slight nod. “I got the letter. We leave tomorrow. The money in that trash heap’s wallet should more than cover the expense.”

Jesper grunted, shifting his weight. “I wish you’d tell me more than –“

Kaz held a hand up, silencing Jesper, who glared at him.

“Tomorrow, then,” said Inej, and she melted into the shadows of the night.

-

The morning was bright and early, and Inej stood on the docks again, feeling an odd sense of déjà vu. It had only been a few months ago that they’d been ready to board a ship for the Ice Court; she could practically see them as they had been. Kaz, stern as ever; Jesper, lonely; Wylan, nervous; and Nina, laughing at Matthias for every word he had said –

The thought of Matthias jolted her. She thought she was forgetting, but every now and then, a bit of conversation they’d shared, a gruff joke or a shared smile, would burrow its way into her head. People died all the time in the Dregs – it was practically in the job description. And yet Matthias had been part of their crew. One of them.

She knew that her path was not without danger, but she chose to walk it anyway. And when she walked it, she walked it gracefully – an acrobat on a tightrope, suspended against the sky, forever holding her breath.

Kaz, Wylan and Jesper. She sighed and found herself wishing for female company, for Nina, her friend, who was taking the loss of Matthias the hardest. She would see Nina soon, she promised herself, if she could do this one thing.

She watched as the familiar faces of her crew moved around her, helping to prepare her sleek schooner for the journey ahead. Inej paused to help them load the strange, misshapen crate below decks as the cursed the size of it. It would slow them down, but only a little. It was necessary.

The boat set sail, mast stark against the perfect blue sky, but not before Kaz had asked exactly how much money the Ravkan royal coffers held.

It was more than enough.

## Irina

Irina Lebedev knew that she was a new student in the Little Palace, and that generally, people in new places stuck out. What she hadn’t expected was the whispering that followed her down the corridors, the averted gazes – or worse, the people who stared at her openly as she walked to her lessons, head high.

It had only been two days. She hadn’t yet eaten in the famed dining hall, taking her meals in her room with Kostya, but she hadn’t seen her sister – Ana – either. Apparently some of the older students were off on missions, helping to defend the crown by using and exercising their powers. She couldn’t help but feel a little let down, but managed to smother it.

She was here. Irina had gone where her mother had wanted her to go, had escaped the cloud of darkness that had quite literally overshadowed her town. So what was it in her that felt so empty? So unaccomplished? It was like there had been more that her mother hadn’t told her, like there was a secret hidden somewhere deep in the palace. It made her think of the nesting dolls she’d often seen stacked up against the cold-smeared window in her home hut, a quaint reminder of when her mother had been a child. Of older times.

Dressed in a strange new kefta, comfortable and warm, Irina slipped out of the door of her room. She crossed the threshold to Kostya’s room (it had been a requirement of her staying at the Little Palace – she had demanded that Kostya be close by) and knocked once, twice, thrice, on the door. He opened it and she saw that he was freshly dressed too, in Summoner’s blue. His blonde hair was a little rumpled, and his eyes – sometimes slate-grey, sometimes the aquamarine of an ever-changing sea  - twinkled into her as he greeted her.

“Ree,” he grinned, and it was then that she saw the shadows under his eyes. How tired he looked. “I was just about to go down to breakfast. Care to come with?”

“You know I will,” she replied lightly, and they made their way through the halls together.

“It’s more dangerous here than the forest,” Kostya whispered under his breath to her. She couldn’t help but laugh a little and agree. If the whispers were bad when she walked past, they were a cacophony when she walked with Kostya.

“That boy’s a Darkling –“

“They saw him! They saw the Darkling come back –“

“What do you think he said to the Sun Summoner to make her leave?”

“Unnatural –“

“Influencing the king –“

And they strolled past with heads held high.

When they reached the dining hall, Irina let out a sigh of relief to see that the food that had been laid out looked delicious, and did not, as Alina had warned, contain too much herring. The white-haired Saint had barely had a chance to speak to them, but she had managed them to warn them about the perils of the food.

Kostya smiled a little where he stood next to her. “It’s good.”

“What is?” Irina inquired, distracted. She was scanning the room for the place with the best food and the least people, where she and Kostya could sit and eat without being interrupted too much.

“The Orders. They’re all mixed. Materialki, Etherealki, Corporalki – they’re all sitting together.”

Irina looked at the larger picture, saw the bright flash of coloured kefta, all mixed together in a vibrant hodgepodge. “Yeah. But none of them want to sit with us.”

“Cheer up, sunshine,” he chuckled, and started to walk over to the most populated area. Grisha all stopped to stare and look up at them as they came closer, their gazes narrow and piercing.

Irina, panicking, hissed, “Kos? What do you think you’re doing?”

“Watch,” he said, and proceeded to jauntily slump into a seat. Irina sat next to him self-consciously, willing her cheeks not to burn.

The people around them were as silent as graves, their gazes pinning down Irina and Kostya like hawks. 

 _This is going to be fun,_ thought Irina, and reached for the waffles.

-

The library at the Ravkan Little Palace was enormous: huge ceilings painted with motifs arched above, while shelves upon shelves circled below, each holding immeasurable amounts of books and manuscripts. Irina was in the middle of one of her history lessons, feet tap-tap-tapping the floor in an irregular motion as she glanced at Kostya across from her.

He looked up and grimaced. Neither of them understood much, although it must have helped for Kostya to have Baghra in his head, telling him what he needed to know.

And then she saw it.

The symbol.

It was simple, really, a quick rendering in one of the most recent books. It was a sunburst – golden and shimmering, not much more than a circle ringed by tongues of bright flame. Her mind flickered back to when Irina had last seen it.

It had been the day she left her home. She could see her mother’s terrified face, hear the awful scream as the front door was torn open, taste the tang of remembered fear as it burnt the tip of her tongue. As Irina stared at the symbol, she remembered what her mother’s last command had been.

_Take the money from the box under my bed and run._

There, on that wooden box, had been emblazoned a symbol.

This symbol. Irina’s eyes darted to the description next to the image.

_This is the mark of the Soldat Sol, the loyal followers of Sankta Alina during the civil war, a religious group which took in ordinary otkazat’sya people in the promise of safety. Some have described it as the Sankta’s own personal army; others, a cult; and yet still others found it to be a family, a safe haven during the reign of the Darkling. They were led by the Apparat, a religious man who had previously been a spiritual advisor to the king._

Irina’s ears began to tune in what the teacher was speaking about.

“I still remember the Apparat,” the teacher said, her face impassive. “Of course, since he served in the King’s court, most of the ordinary Grisha at the time did not come into much contact with him. However, primary sources have confirmed that he tried especially hard to connect with the Sun Summoner, Alina Starkov, and when she was martyred...” The teacher cleared her throat uncomfortably, as if she didn’t know if she should talk about Alina Starkov’s death when Alina Starkov had returned to the Little Palace. “When it was believed that Alina Starkov died, the Apparat was met with both praise and scorn, but instead of returning to court, he was sent by our esteemed King Nikolai on a religious retreat.”

Irina felt an idea forming in the back of her head, cloudy and shapeless, but still there. Across the table, Kostya shot her a questioning glance; she shook her head a little and smiled.

On the way out, as she passed under the ancient, gilded archway, book tucked under her arm, he hurried to catch up with her.

“Ree?” Kostya asked, slowing enough to walk beside her. His blue-grey eyes shimmered in the light that shone from the chandeliers high above, and the black thread on his blue Summoner’s kefta glinted darkly. “What are you thinking of? I know that look on your face. You’re cooking up something.”

“What are you talking about?” Irina replied, and she was met with an incredulous stare. “Okay, maybe I do have an idea. Maybe it’s just not a good idea.”

“Can I help you with it?” Kostya replied.

She shrugged, laughing. “I told you about the day I left home, didn’t I?”

He frowned. “Yeah. There was somebody at the door, your mother told you to run, and when you looked back, there was a cloud of darkness. I.... I’m sorry, Ree. We never found out what happened to her.”

She bit back the familiar sting that pricked at her eyes whenever she thought about her mother. “That’s not what I was thinking about. When she told me to run, she told me to take money from a box under her bed, and that box... Well, it had the mark of the Soldat Sol on it.”

“Alina’s mark,” Kostya breathed. Their eyes met. “And that means –“

“She might know what happened to my mother. Or why it did,” said Irina, her heart fluttering wildly in her chest.

Their paces quickened. They approached the dormitories, and Irina quirked an eyebrow at Kostya. “Meet me by the water fountain in the gardens in ten minutes.”

“Agreed,” said Kostya, and they both turned into their rooms, the doors quietly snicking shut behind them in perfect unison.

But waiting for Irina was a surprise.

A woman sat on the bed, talking in a low voice to a figure next to her. Irina froze in her tracks, her breath catching in her throat, and repressed a gasp when she saw the glint of white hair, the flash of brown eyes, scarred hands, and realised who the people were.

Alina Starkov, the Sun Summoner. And Nikolai Lantsov, the king of Ravka.

“Irina,” said the king, rising to his feet, an apologetic smile on his lips. “We’re sorry to intrude on you like this, but we thought you would have preferred a private audience to a royal summons.”

 _Breathe,_ Irina told herself, and straightened up. She bowed her head, and managed to get out, “Yes, your Highness.”

Next to the king, she thought she heard Alina snort.

“There’s no need for titles in here,” said Nikolai, and gestured for her to sit in the armchair by the window. She did so gratefully, eyeing them carefully.

“It’s about the search for the Darkling,” Alina said, taking the seat opposite Irina. “We think you can help.”

“How?” said Irina. “I’m not even a good Tidemaker. And he’s used me before.”

Alina sighed. “Exactly. He’s used you before. And we have a feeling that he’s used you even before you met me, without you knowing.” She paused. “I’m sorry, Irina, but we think he took your mother.”

Ice, relentless and unyielding, started to pour into Irina’s heart, a steady trickle that eventually deepened to a deafening roar, a waterfall of snow and pain. “What?” she said, surprised that she could hear the words over the cacophony in her head.

She was going to find the Darkling. She was going to find him, and kill him. Her fingers ached with it, with the relentless need to crush something beneath them.

Nikolai laced his fingers together. “When you told us how you ran from your home, you mentioned that when you looked back, you saw a cloud of darkness.” It wasn’t a question – just a statement.

“Yes,” said Irina.

“It’s not certain, but we’re considering all potential leads,” sighed Alina.

“He’s a hard man to find, a harder one to kill,” said King Nikolai, shrugging.

Alina’s voice rang out, sharp. “Oh, you can kill him all you like. He just won’t stay dead.”

Irina looked up in surprise, and saw that the former Sankta’s eyes glowed with some kind of dark light, and there was something about the way her white hair hung in front of her face that made her seem like something to run from, something to hide from. Then it was gone, and Alina morphed back into the tired woman, cracking a smile at Irina. “I’ve tried.”

“So you’re saying that if I go with you – if I help you find the Darkling – my mother might still be alive?” Irina queried, her limbs cold and her heart stuttering in her chest, barely keeping up.

“That would be the case,” said Nikolai. He glanced at Alina.

“And your sister, Anastasiya, will be returning from her post at the border soon,” added Alina. “We can give your family a place in the Little Palace, or, if you don’t want to stay here, Os Alta. You’ll be able to live in peace.”

Irina could picture it then. A small town house in Os Alta, where she’d come home every day to see her mother smiling in the sunlight of the kitchen window, making the skillet bread the way that Irina’s father had taught her to, with quick pinches and precise movements. Anastasiya would be home, too, and in the evenings they’d all have dinner together by the warmth of the stove. Sometimes they might go out to the sunny markets strung with exotic wares and marvel at the imports from places like Ketterdam and Novyi Zem, or to the famous Ravkan theatres, and always, they would be safe. Irina would learn to be a Tidemaker, and soon her power would come as easily as breathing; then she and Anastasiya would practice together, weaving their abilities in unison.

It could happen. It could be real. She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath, and when she opened them, the pain in her chest had eased a little.

But there would be the Darkling and possibly his army to face. She would be more than ready to fight them if it meant having the future she wanted for herself and her family.

She nodded. “I’ll do it.”

“There is one catch, though,” said Nikolai, and Irina’s head jerked up to look at him. “Kostya will have to stay here.”

“Why?” said Irina, but secretly, she was a little thankful. Despite her desire to stay with him, she at least wanted him to stay somewhere safe.

“The Darkling’s mother, Baghra, didn’t just give Kostya her power. She is inside his head. If the Darkling manages to convince her to come to his side, Kostya will be dragged into it too.” Alina’s voice was weary.

Irina hadn’t thought of that, but now the possibility terrified her: Kostya’s body dragged around like a puppet by the invisible voice in his head, forcing him to do things that he never would have wanted, his powers being used to serve the Darkling.

All the more to fight for.

“We leave tonight.”

## Jesper

The boat journey to Ravka would have been much longer, but it was helped by the fact that Inej’s crew was one of the best. The sailors laughed and joked with each other, and the Grisha grinned as they raised their arms to fill the sails and control the waves, making the dark schooner cut through the sea like a knife through butter.

To be perfectly honest, he hadn’t missed being at sea at all. He was restless, pacing up and down, but a cool touch on his shoulder stopped him, slowed him, calmed him.

Wylan.

Looking a little green from seasickness.

He couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face, slow as sunrise.

“Hey, merchling,” he said, and Wylan rolled his eyes at him.

“Have you seen it yet?” Wylan asked instead.

“Seen what?”

“They’re putting it together now. The machine that Kaz bought from that Fabrikator.”

Jesper’s head cocked up, interested. “Kaz bought a Fabrikator-made machine?”

Wylan shrugged. “Yeah. I thought you knew. Seeing as you’re our resident expert Fabrikator.”

They chatted as Wylan led him over to the main expanse of deck, where a crate about as tall as Jesper was being unloaded. A thick, waterproof tarp covered the top, impervious to rain and fire – Jesper recognised the material – and as he watched, Inej was helping people pull it back. They seemed to be struggling, and so Jesper held up a hand. His mind focused, narrowing to the piece of tarp; he could sense each particle, humming in the air as if tied to him. He’d been practicing his powers – he just needed to focus a little more. He shut his eyes, visualising the tarp lifting from whatever was underneath and falling neatly to the floor. When his eyes snapped open again, it was moving, barely.

 _Focus._ Sweat beaded on his brow.

People stepped back on Inej’s shouted command, and the thick, heavy, weather-resistant tarp ever so slowly peeled back, as if Jesper were peeling back the skin of a sweet orange. It collapsed to the floor in an undignified heap, and Wylan clapped politely.

“Glad you could join us, Jes,” grinned Inej, and he laughed back.

He approached the crate. It was huge, and oddly shaped, taller than almost everyone on board. “What’s even inside it?” Jesper walked closer in disbelief. How had this even fit on the ship?

“A boat that can go underwater,” said Wylan, smiling.

Jesper laughed. “Good one, merchling.” Then he noticed that nobody else had laughed, and he paused. “Wait, really?”

“The more kruge you have, the more power you have,” said Kaz from over his shoulder, readjusting his gloves. Jesper glanced at them. They were dark leather, and the insides were embroidered with something that he’d never been given a chance to see, though he knew it was there, because Inej had bought Kaz those gloves.

“It’s called a submarine,” added Inej, while producing a key and unlocking the side of the crate. Part of it swung open like a door, and her crew started to go inside and produce parts.

“It can go underwater? Isn’t that a problem?” Jesper queried. “How will we go inside it if we need to, you know, breathe? And why do we even need it?”

“We’ll have a Tidemaker and a Squaller,” said Kaz airily, waving his hand. “And we need it so that we can get that money from the Ravkan crown.”

“But –“ Jesper started, and then shook his head, chuckling. He wouldn’t get any answers from Kaz if Kaz didn’t want to give any.

“Nina should be here in about a day and a half, and we’re almost at the harbour near the Ravkan-Fjerdan border. We need to finish putting this thing together,” said Kaz.

It was then that Jesper saw that the crate held not a whole machine, but many parts of one.

“We could use your _marketable skills_ to help, Jes,” said Wylan from beside him, grinning. Jesper smiled back and readied himself to focus his mind again.

 

And above everything, the sun blazed down, hot and unrelenting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry i haven't uploaded in a couple of days! i ran out of chapters to post and am currently writing more. soon all of the individual storylines should converge soon so that the povs don't get too confusing :)


	9. Prey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You must ask yourself:  
> where is it snowing?
> 
> White of forgetfulness,  
> of desecration—
> 
> It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says
> 
> \- Persephone the Wanderer
> 
> \----  
> family problems?

## Alina

Alina stood outside Kostya Grushov’s door, waiting for Irina to come out. When Irina emerged, the petite girl’s face was splattered with tears – a miniature constellation of them, peppering her already freckled, deep brown skin. In her hands was clenched something – a false Saints’ bone, a reminder of lost hope and spiderweb-frail promises.

 Alina felt an ache in her own chest as she looked down at Irina. The girl was so young – younger than Alina had been when she’d first met the Darkling – and she’d lost so much. Her parents. Her friends.

But then again, Alina knew that they all still had far more to lose, and they would lose it, if they didn’t find and kill the Darkling.

Well, most of them. What did Alina have left to lose? She’d lost the glittering illusion of a peaceful life in the countryside with Mal, and she knew that she would lose all of the people around her eventually. With the return of her power had come an unsettling thought: that she would outlive them all, by maybe hundreds of years. She would be nearly immortal.

Alina was so much stronger now, and it wasn’t just her power, although she felt glad to have it back. It was like an old friend who had died had come back to life, like a space inside her that had previously only been yawning emptiness had burst to life and was now teeming with fireworks and spices, colours and vibrant ribbons of power. But with Mal gone, somehow she felt like her cotton-soft bones had turned to steel and now she could finally stand on her own two feet.

She felt powerful. More powerful than she had ever been in her life. And she’d seen it reflected back at her: when she greeted people who doubted that she could really be Alina Starkov, the Sun Summoner, and she saw the realisation in their eyes the minute her gaze met theirs. It felt wonderful.

Was this how the Darkling had felt? Was his cruelty a way to prove to the world that he was strong, that he wouldn’t let it conquer him like it surely would have? Or was everything he did just senseless violence?

She led Irina down the corridors, speaking soothing words she’d learned while teaching in a Keramzin orphanage. It was strange to be back in the Little Palace and not to feel like a child. Alina was nineteen, nearly twenty – or she guessed somewhere around that age. She was an orphan, after all.

They swept out of the Little Palace with their search party: Alina recognised a few otkazat’sya (non-Grisha) soldiers amongst them. Zoya was there, her pretty face tinted red and blue by the biting chill of the Ravkan autumn night. She could smell anticipation in the air, and drank it in, steadying herself.

They climbed into the carriage _,_ and off they went, the soldiers’ uniforms dark and the lamplight weak enough that Alina spread her hands and let a warm glow descend upon the group. It warmed her, too, and for the first time in a long time, the nip of the cold didn’t bother her.

Irina was looking up at her with something like reverence.

“What is it?” Alina asked, but not harshly. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” Irina replied, brushing off Alina’s question. “But... Was it ever true? Were you a Saint?”

Alina didn’t know what to say. She looked at the ground, pausing to push away a strand of white hair that had floated in front of her while still keeping her other hand aloft to summon the light. “I guess it depends on who you ask.”

Irina nodded, and this time Alina caught the flicker of sadness in the other girl.

“My sister,” said Irina. “She was a Summoner too, because of you.”

“So she got her powers when I died,” said Alina, her mouth twisting up into a humourless smile at the memory. Technically, she’d never died, although she didn’t know what counted as death anymore. It had been so strange to see an exact replica of her own body go up in flames beside the Darkling’s. “Nobody stays dead anymore.”

“No. Some people will stay dead forever.” Irina closed her eyes and leaned back against the side of the carriage. And Alina felt the pain in herself, because she knew far too much about death, and war, and how it felt to lose those you loved. Alina hadn’t just lost other people. She could barely remember the sour seventeen-year-old girl she’d been almost three years ago on the cusp of the Shadow Fold, on the verge of her whole future as someone who would shape Ravka. Alina had lost that girl a long time ago, killed her old self as if she was shedding a skin.

It seemed like a lot  of responsibility.

But she would take it. She could take it.

For Ravka, for those she loved, for herself.

 

## Irina

They rode on through the night and all through the next day, the smoothly oiled, Materialki-made carriage serving them well, all the way through towns with paved streets and forests full of nothing much until they could see the tall, jagged peaks of the Petrazoi in the distance. Beyond was Fjerda, but here before them lay sprawled-out green forest – a place where Irina had grown up – and the small town next to it. Irina felt a jolt of familiarity rush through her as she saw it: there was the familiar church spire, the familiar cobbled roads, the neat shops and rows of lights strung up for the festivities that always accompanied this time of year. Her heart ached with memory and her hands shivered at the cold.

The false Saint’s bone – Sankta Alina’s bone – hung heavily at her throat. She remembered when she’d tried to say goodbye to Kostya, when she’d walked into his room, one of the most beautiful rooms she’d ever known, and seen him staring out the window like a black crow against the starkness of the fading pale day. Her heart had wrung itself out and tears had soaked from her eyes, spattering the ground, sounding like drops of blood.

“Kostya –“ she had tried to say, but nothing came out. He turned, and she saw his eyes, and in that moment, she remembered to be strong.

She would have to be strong, to try her best to be unyielding and fierce, if she wanted to protect him. Being good or being in love wasn’t enough to stay alive, she knew, thinking of Dakota’s death aboard the ship.

He’d taken it in his stride, quietly, shedding a few tears of his own. And then he’d taken her Saint’s bone in his hands. Shadows swirled around it, and disappeared into it, black an unfathomable.

“You can use this to talk to me,” he said. “I’ve put – well, Baghra showed me how to do it, but I put a piece of myself into it. I can talk to you through it, and if you talk back, I’ll listen. So you won’t be alone. You’ll know I’m safe.”

She hadn’t used it yet, but it was comforting to know he was always there.

Now, they left the carriage a little way away from the main road of the village so as not to draw too much attention, and left one Heartrender and a handful of non-Grisha guards inside to protect it. Then they entered the village, Alina with her hair dyed by the Corporalki, and Zoya with a thick scarf across her face. Irina just wished that she could cover her face more, to hide her from the accusatory stares of the townspeople that she knew would come.

They entered the town quietly; Zoya Nazyalensky made her way to the local tavern with a couple of the soldiers, to try and see if she could get some gossip, while Irina led Alina down the long, narrowing path to her home.

It was a good fifteen-minute walk at least, and they moved extra slowly so as not to alert anything – or anyone – that was nearby. Irina sucked in lungfuls of the ripe, dying autumn air, memorising its scent, the scent that she’d known every autumn growing up. She ran fingers through her curly hazel hair, trying to calm herself, and Alina followed after her, silent as a ray of light.

 _What will I find there?_ Irina wondered, her heart thudding so loud in her chest that she was sure everyone around her could hear for miles. The last time she’d seen her home, she’d been sure that her mother was dead and that she could never return. For Saints’ sake, there had been a massive, towering pillar of darkness above the building when she’d last seen it.

That didn’t bode well.

The house loomed into view, and Irina repressed a choking noise.

It looked as if a storm had blown through. The door had been ripped violently off its hinges and lay collecting rainwater about ten metres away from where it had originally been. The glass in the upstairs windows was shattered, and as they got closer, the absolute silence became clear; no animals lurked here, as if nothing living wanted to be so close to this abomination, this ruined, wasted piece of land.

“I’m so sorry,” said Alina. “Do you want to go inside? I could use you as a guard outside if you can’t look at it.”

Resolute, Irina shook her head. “No. I want to see it. I’ll be able to tell if something’s changed, after all.” It felt stupid after she’d said it – of course the house had been changed – but Alina nodded silently and they slipped through the doorway.

It was another shock. Despite the ruined exterior, the inside of the house was perfect – meticulously so. Everything was in its place, but it still felt jilted and odd. Her mother’s woollen blanket lay draped over the armchair by the fire where it always had, but it still looked odd from where Irina was standing. When she went over to look, she saw that it had been neatly, perfectly placed – but the wrong way around, as if whoever had put it there wasn’t quite sure how to do it.

“Someone’s tidied up,” said Irina, frowning. “What happened to my mother?” She bit her lips and scanned the room. Everything seemed to be in its place. Nothing was missing. Except, of course, her mother.

They climbed the stairs, Irina carefully showing Alina where to step so that they wouldn’t creak, and the upper floor was the same: everything was meticulous, but a little _too_ perfect. Whoever had been here – likely the Darkling – had had plenty of time to clean up.

And then they entered Irina’s old bedroom.

Irina screamed.

## Nina

Nina’s coat was wrapped tightly around her instead of the vivid red kefta she loved – that would too visible this far north, and would mark her out as a target, someone for wandering drüskelle to capture and kill. No, she had left her recognisable clothes behind, and now that she was almost in Fjerda, she wore the clothes of Ravkan peasants, designed to make her blend in with the dry-eyed townspeople who occupied the towns in the forests here.

Up until now, she’d managed to ride wagons or supply carts, paying enough that the drivers wouldn’t refuse, but not enough for them to suspect that she had far more tucked away in the concealed inner pockets of her coat. Now, though, as she neared the border towns, there were less and less people willing to take her.

And so she walked steadily by the side of the road, cringing at how much more difficult it was than it had once been. Before, when she’d still been a Heartrender and not whatever it was she could do now, she had never tired; all she needed to do was control her legs, increase the oxygen supply, ease the muscles. Now, she felt a burn in her legs as the trudged along the tracks.

Until she saw it.

The carriage, though not displaying the bright blue-and-gold emblem of the Ravkan throne, was unmistakable. Nina had rode in it multiple times herself, and as she watched it past, she caught a flash of blue eyes and lustrous black hair in the window. That could only be Zoya. But what were they doing here, in a place where there was so little? What were the people inside hoping to accomplish?

Nina intended to find out.

She started to follow the tracks that the carriage had left behind, lifting her skirt so as not to let it trail in the mud. Eventually, she came to where they’d left it – she was just in time to see Zoya, Alina and Irina leave it, heading for where Nina knew the village was. But Alina and Irina split from Zoya, and in that moment, Nina was faced with a decision. Follow Zoya, or follow Alina?

The moment was over too fast. Nina cursed herself and hoped she was making the right decision as she slipped into the woods after Alina and Irina, trying to walk faster so that she could keep up with them and ask them what they were doing here. Maybe they were looking for her.

She followed them through the trees, but with every step, she fell further behind; it was clear that Irina knew the path well, and Nina was constantly second-guessing herself. Stupid girl. She cursed herself again. Nina wondered why she hadn’t just gone and asked Zoya, who was probably in a warm tavern in the town right now, eating food that Nina would have liked to share.

She let out an exasperated huff of air through her mouth.

And then she saw it – the house. It was a ruin of what it had once been, shattered and torn, and Nina thought for one absurd minute that the insides poured darkness, that blackness streamed out of its windows like coal-coloured smoke. But then she blinked, and the darkness was gone, replaced with the fragile wreck of a house.

Crouching in the foliage, she saw Alina and Irina enter, and she was about to follow, but then her eye snagged on a movement in one of the windows. It was nothing, really – a flicker of motion as slight as a dark bird flapping its wings – but still, it gave Nina pause. And then she heard a rustle in the bushes across from her, and heard the faintest whisper, carried to her on the breeze.

“They’re inside?”

“They are.”

“Good. We’ll see what she has to say.”

Nina closed her eyes for a brief moment, considering her options. This was clearly a trap; she should get inside and try to warn them. But how? She couldn’t move without alerting whoever was near that she was there.

Her fingers curled into fists, and she prepared herself for a fight.

## Irina

The scream tore itself through her throat, half terror, half relief. She stared into a pair of bright blue eyes that mirrored her own, framed by terracotta skin and masses of curly, oil-black hair. Next to her, Alina’s hands flew up into a fighting position, but Irina moved in front of her.

“No,” Irina gasped, fighting to keep her voice steady.

Because perched on Irina’s bed, resplendent in a shimmering blue kefta, was Anastasiya - Ana.

Irina’s sister.

Irina drank in her sister’s appearance. She hadn’t seen her in months, but she was shocked at how Ana had barely changed, and how she had changed too much. Her heart beat an insistent, inconsistent tattoo in her chest, and her breathing slowed, stuck. Ana had grown out her hair; it was just as Irina remembered it, a curly frenzy, but now it hung heavy at her waist. There were new scars on her hands, and the smile that Ana gave Irina was something that she had never seen before. It terrified her a little.

What did it mean now that Ana was here?

“It’s just me,” said Ana a little lazily, eyebrow raised, stretching. Irina cringed inwardly. “No need to panic.”

“Ana, I –“ Irina choked on her own words, and then stumbled across the room to Ana. She buried her face in her sister’s kefta, drinking in the smell of her, the feel of her. She hugged Ana tight, so tight that she was afraid to ever let go. “Ana, I’ve missed you so much,” she breathed, feeling her sister’s arms come around her.

But there was something wrong with her sister’s embrace. Ana held Irina a little too loosely, and was the first one to break off. Irina stumbled back, her balance thrown off by how quickly it had ended, and searched her sister’s face. There was something new in Ana’s eyes, cold and steely and determined.

“And you brought the Sankta,” observed Ana, her new, strangely chilly glance taking in Alina’s white hair and raised hands. Alina slowly lowered them  and smiled, nodding.

“Most people don’t call me that anymore,” Alina replied.

“You gave me my power,” said Ana, holding up her hand so that a thin ray of light burst from it, making her face seem too bright, and in contrast, making the shadows seem deeper and starker. As quickly as it had come, it flickered out. “I ought to thank you.”

“You don’t need to,” muttered Alina. Her voice rose. “But what are you doing here? What happened to this house?”

Irina added, “Have you seen our Madraya?”

Anastasiya’s face closed off at the mention of their mother, but she met Irina’s gaze.

Irina didn’t like this. She couldn’t ever remember her sister being so detached, so strange. What had happened to Ana?

The next words shook the room even as they left Ana’s mouth. “I’m here because he sent me.”

Irina took in a sharp breath, and fell back a step, her heart racing. _He sent me._ Ana could only mean –

“You serve the Darkling,” accused Alina, eyes glowing, her hands starting to pool with light. No. this couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be real. Irina didn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it. _Please let it not be true._

But Ana nodded, any traces of a smile falling away from her face as she rose. “We all do, in the end. You know that better than anyone, Alina. And you know what he wants.”

Irina sucked in a breath, looking to Alina.

She watched the fire in Alina’s eyes intensify. “He wants Ravka.” And then, more quietly: “He wants me.”

Ana did smile then, a cruel, glittering thing that seemed more like a snake’s smile than a girl’s. Her eyes shone with a hard light in a way that Irina had never seen before, and Irina choked back a sob. She’d been looking for her sister for so long – _so long -_  and she’d found someone else instead. A ball of ice formed in her chest, and numbing cold sparked through her veins.

“Sankta,” Ana sneered, and the ball of ice around Irina’s heart hardened, thickened, cracked. She closed her eyes for a brief second, and imagined she could hear her heartstrings splitting, crackling under the pressure of the relentless frost.

“And he sent you.” Irina levelled her gaze at her sister. “Why.”

Ana’s face softened for a second, making Irina want to keel over, because she remembered that face, loved that face. Ana had never been a hard person to love. “Because I want to be with you, Irina. You’re my sister. Blood stays together. Come with me.”

“You’re....” Irina’s chest hurt so much from the coldness inside her. “You’re joking, right? Are you crazy? No. No, I won’t. I won’t go with you.”

Ana had never been hard to love, but this wasn’t Ana anymore. This was more a cobra than a girl, scales gleaming, eyes ready for the kill.

She watched her sister inhale a deep breath, hurt and resentment sparking briefly for a second. Then it was gone, and the snake was back, fangs bared, stepping forward.

Later, Irina wondered what her sister would have done next – if she would have stopped or if she would have smashed Irina to pieces on the wall.

She never got the chance to find out.

What was left of the window exploded in a hailstorm of glass, sending shards through the air like deadly knives. Alina yanked Irina down, a worried crease forming between her brows. Some of the shrapnel still caught her; she could feel it stinging her skin. She could worry about that later.

“Was that you?” Irina muttered breathlessly to Alina.

Alina shook her head curtly. “I don’t know who it was, but we need to get out of here before they get any more bright ideas.”

Ana had fallen to the floor, glass shredding her beautiful brown skin into ribbons, blood streaking the curly hair that Irina had admired and braided a thousand times. Were they just going to leave her there?

Irina felt the ice she’d built around her heart. Considered letting it melt away, considered helping her sister against all odds – maybe dragging her to safety. Her love for Ana tugged at her like a puppet master controlling his strings, and uncertainty threaded itself through the coldness, threatening to undo it.

Screams started outside, high and furious.

Irina stepped over her sister’s pained body, face hard, and started to sprint down the corridor. She could do this. She could leave her sister behind. She would think on it later.

“Over here,” she motioned to Alina, racing down the corridor to her mother’s bedroom; she flung the door open, jumping on the bed, and vaulted over to the window, yanking it open. She could see the tree branch hanging close to it, only about half a metre away. From there they would be able to shimmy down the tree and get a better grasp of what was going on.

“We’re jumping?” Alina asked, and Irina nodded.

“I’ll go first. I know this place better,” gasped Irina, head pounding, all of her feeling numb, and leaped.

Her hands grazed rough bark. Muscles burning, she hefted herself up onto the branch, rolling over onto her stomach on its broad boughs  just in time to avoid something dark zipping through the air by her ankle. Cursing, Irina blinked tears from her eyes and scooted down so that Alina could jump next. She peered through the leaves, trying to ignore the pain in the scratches up and down her near-shredded arms.

Was she going delusional?

Maybe, she thought. Maybe she was already so insane that she couldn’t tell.

There were people darting in and out of the trees, clad in white jackets that looked suspiciously similar to kefta, each with a  different coloured armband around their wrists: she spotted some purple on one man, bleeding red scarlet on another, bright blue on a third. Grisha, then. But who were they here for?

And then she spotted a familiar figure, not wearing a kefta, but ordinary peasant’s clothes. Nina Zenik’s hair was wild and long around her face, and mud stained her dress and body, leaves and branches clinging to her. But she still looked every part a royal soldier, eyes spitting green fire as her hands moved in precise, brutal arcs through the air.

“What’s she controlling?” Irina whispered when Alina dropped down beside her.

“Look at the pouches she’s holding,” Alina replied, and true, there were pouches at Nina’s belt and one in her hands. From them flowed a dull grey mixture of power that choked attackers and sharp fragments that impaled them and carved them up like butcher’s meat.

“Well, we’re not just going to sit here, are we?” Irina quipped, and jumped neatly from the branches, turning in the air. She needed this – for her mind to go blank as she faced her assailants, her every nerve of her body to focus on the fight and the fight alone.

She told herself that, but it wasn’t just focusing that kept her punching the woman that snuck up on Nina; it wasn’t just numbness that she felt when she cracked a man’s nose, pushed him into the path of a sharp flying object and watched blood spurt through the air like a fountain.  It almost felt good. _You took Ana from me. Now I’m taking everything you are._

Or was even that true? She considered, swinging her arm upward to combat a stream of Tidemaker water shooting towards her. Ana had left by herself. She didn’t seem like she’d been forced into joining the Darkling. She seemed like she loved it – like she enjoyed leaving Irina to fight for someone who had been a dead man for almost three years now. Like Irina was nothing to her.

 _I will never be nothing,_ Irina thought, death blooming from her fingertips. She breathed in the scent of blood, and coddled the permafrost around her heart, letting it take her. Letting it numb her with icy fire.

Had she not been good enough for Anastasiya? Waited, travelled, suffered?

Was there anything Irina could have done to be better?

_If I cannot be better, I will be worse._

_So much worse._

But still, when the last assailant crumpled to the ground, Irina sank to her knees. Her hands were painted up to her wrists in gore and dirt, and she was a girl lost; she knew that inside, her, the anger burned like a smoky black fire, but still she was so cold.

So _cold._

-

Later, she let herself be walked back to the town, let them lead her to a bathroom where she washed the grime off herself. She kept reliving Ana’s face in her head. Kept repeating her final promise in her mind, over and over, a whispered covenant.

I will be worse.

She would hunt down the Darkling and make him pay, would wrench apart his shadows like she’d helped to wrench apart his men. Irina would defeat him.

And how would she do that? She knew Nina was going somewhere uncharted, dangerous, deadly. She could tell, just looking at her. So when it was time to depart, Irina spoke quietly.

“Nina.”

Heads turned. Irina hadn’t spoken  much the whole time, despite people’s attempts to get through to her. Only Alina had understood and given her space.

Nina’s eyes found hers, concerned.

Irina cleared her throat, starting to feel wobbly on her feet. “Nina. Take me with you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so so sorry! i haven't had as much time to write lately, so a lot of this is completely unedited, but i hope you like it :)


	10. No Lover Ever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?  
> These things he couldn’t imagine;  
> no lover ever imagines them.  
> \- Louise Gluck  
> \----  
> darklina! submarines! minor tlot spoilers but nothing too tragic.

## Inej

Nina arrived at their ship in a small rowing boat, a small, solitary figure behind her, shivering with the cold. Inej could recognise her as Irina, the small half-Suli girl who she had rescued only a short while ago from the damp hold of that slaver’s ship. There was something different about Irina now that Inej couldn’t quite grasp. There was a difference in the way that Irina moved; her actions were more deliberate and sharp, and when Inej looked into her eyes to greet her, she knew. Rage, maybe. Or grief. It was all the same. It was all different. Something had happened to Irina and thawed her, broken her.

Inej couldn’t help but feel a little pity. After all, the world broke all of them, in their own ways. But that didn’t mean their jagged edges couldn’t find some way to fit together, if her Saints allowed.

She hugged Nina tight, marking the shadows that had blossomed under the other girl’s eyes, but she knew better than to comment on them.

“You’re a day and a half late,” said Kaz from where he leaned lazily on his crow cane. His tone was cold, but the edges of his lips curled up in the barest smirk.

“Sorry,” said Nina, sounding not at all sorry. She batted her lashes at him, smiling like a cat. Inej stifled a laugh. “We were just _so_ busy, you know?”

“I was hoping you’d enlighten us, in fact,” added Kaz. “What’s happened since your last letter?”

“Is this story time?” called out Wylan. “I love story time.”

Kaz shot him a glare. Jesper just moved to put an arm around Wylan’s shoulders, whispering something to him that made him laugh, the noise spilling into the air like confetti.

“I’ll tell you all later,” said Nina, her eyes meeting Inej’s meaningfully. So there was something important to know. Nina’s gaze wandered back meaningfully to where Irina stood, cold and hard, broken. Inej knew what Nina was trying to say: _Something happened to her._

“Like I was saying,” said Kaz, his voice a loud, gravelly rasp, “Nina and our little friend are a day and a half late. Which means that we need to go. Now.” He turned to Inej, raising an eyebrow. “Is that alright with your crew?”

Inej nodded. “They’re ready. Jesper, is the submarine ready?”

“I think so,” said Jesper. “I hope we don’t all drown in it, anyway.”

“Submarine?” Irina asked, confused. Her thick brows furrowed, her rich brown skin creasing. “What’s a submarine?”

-

They only barely managed to fit.

The submarine was tiny and only contained four seats, but the six of them – Inej, Jesper, Kaz, Nina, Wylan and Irina – managed to squeeze themselves in tight. The walls pressed in and Inej shuffled uncomfortably until she managed to squeeze her body into a somewhat more forgiving position. Looking around, she noted that Jesper sat by a large round window made of Grisha-hardened glass. His fingers flexed around some kind of lever, holding it as gingerly as if he were holding one of his pearl-handled revolvers. Irina was squeezed in next to him, her eyes wide open, gazing out at all of the blue water beyond.

Inej noticed again that there was something off about the girl. Something cold. 

“At least we have a Tidemaker now,” Wylan offered, smiling at Irina. He had been welcoming to her when Irina was in Ketterdam, Inej remembered. Irina offered a small smile back at him, a brief flower of kindness blossoming in the darkness of her eyes before disappearing again.

They started the descent; Inej stared out of the thick, clear, glass window as the world above faded away to nothing. Water rippled outside, spears of light casting strange, wavering patterns. Pressure built in Inej’s head; she winced, swallowing, as she watched the sea turn from a clear, unwavering blue to a dark ultramarine.

“Lights, Jesper,” Kaz said.

Jesper flicked some kind of dial and a bonelight clicked on in front of the submarine, illuminating the way. Inej had to hold back a gasp as she took in the strange, jutting rocks that loomed like spectres, the strange fish darting in and out of the waters, the eerie shadows cast all around them.

“Saints,” she breathed, salt filling her nostrils. “It’s a whole different world down here.”

“Is it?” Nina asked sarcastically. “I didn’t realise that the Fjerdan seabed was all that different from being aboveground.”

“We might die down here too,” said Irina suddenly, her voice brittle and hoarse. “So no, it’s not all that different.”

Kaz was trying not to smile.

They were in the sea at the very top of Fjerda, in between the fragments of the small island named Kenst Hjerte – _Broken Heart._ Inej was sure that she’d heard stories about this place, that once, there had been a beautiful, rich city on the land, a palace lined with gold perched  in the centre of the island. Even then, Fjerda had been afraid of the Grisha and their magic, hundred of years ago.

It was gone now, anyway.

There was one story that tugged at her brain. A story about a sildroher – a mermaid, a fabled creature of the deep. The details eluded her. She should be focusing, anyway.

Something dark flitted past the window of the submarine; the flare of bonelight shone on sharp teeth and brutal eyes. Inej’s puse flared in interest, just as the entire crew sucked in a collective breath and leaned a little closer, hoping to get another glance. Anticipation and dread leaked into the air as if the darkness of the sea beyond was spilling into the rickety submarine.

“You were right, Nina,” said Kaz quietly.

“I’m always right,” Nina replied, but there was a tinge of fear in her voice.

“Kaz? Nina? I’d like to know exactly _what_ it is we’re looking for down here,” Wylan cut in, his voice unnaturally high. “That thing has a lot of teeth.”

“So does Kaz, and you’re not afraid of him,” Inej said.

“Actually, we’re all terrified of Kaz,” said Jesper. “Which way should I go, Zenik?”

“Whichever way is deepest and darkest.”

Wylan put his head in his hands. An exasperated huff sounded. “You’re joking. You. Are. Joking. Inej, please tell me this is a joke.”

Inej shrugged nonchalantly. Her gaze caught on something outside the window. “Look.”

All around them, amongst the swaying blue-green sea grass and shifting shapes, rose a submerged wreckage of a city; ruins of cathedral spires and the tips of palaces jutted out from the rocky seabed, barely illuminated by the bonelight torch that hung in front of the submarine. Shattered buildings mingled with tatters of cloth, rubble and stones and eerie mould-like plants that crept over everything like a dark shadow. The bonelight swayed. Kaz watched impassively.

In the distance, Inej imagined she could hear singing, a kind of mournful dirge that echoed through everything like a booming bell. She shivered. _Saints protect me,_ she thought, wishing she hadn’t left her knives on the boat.

“Oh, no,” Irina whispered.

“What is it?” Wylan asked. He did not sound very happy. “Why is everything always such a huge mystery?”

“Because it would be pretty embarrassing if we got it wrong,” said Nina. “Given the fact that we’re basing our journey off a fairy tale.”

There was silence for a couple of seconds, and Wylan seemed to sink even lower in his seat, if that was even humanly possibly. Inej reached out and patted him on the back.

“We’re going to see Ulla, aren’t we?” asked Irina. “We’re going to visit the sea witch.”

Inej knew exactly what was happening then, exactly what was in the Kenst Fjerte at the bottom of the deathly cold sea. There was an old Ravkan legend that Ulla, a sidroher – a mermaid – had caused the awful destruction of the ruined city that surrounded them even now. She had been scorned and betrayed, and with her ruinous magic, she had split the island in two and become twisted and dark and evil. Legend had it that she still waited at the bottom of the sea, hungry, watchful.

Legend also said that Ulla liked to drown any sailors that got too close, but Inej guessed that part wasn’t as important to Kaz and Nina.

“The sea witch. That makes everything so much clearer,” said Wylan sarcastically.

“Wylan, shut up,” said Kaz.

Wylan frowned but shut up.

Out of his pocket, Kaz drew something shiny and hard; a shard of a mirror. It was no bigger than his hand, and it sparkled like sunlight on fresh snow.

“Checking your reflection, Kaz?” Jesper asked lightly.

“This will draw Ulla to us,” Kaz said confidently.

“Where did you even get that?” Jesper queried, confounded.

“It was Kostya.” Irina’s voice was flat. “Wasn’t it? Baghra is the Sea Witch’s mother.”

Now it was Inej’s turn to be confused. “How is _Baghra_ the mother of –“

But she never got a chance to finished the question, because something hit the submarine, hard. Through the window, she caught a glimpse of a dark, scaly tail, a pair of glowing eyes. And then pressed up against the side of the submarine was something that Inej had never thought she would see.

A webbed hand, slimy and pale, pressed flush up against the side of the window. Jesper grunted as he tried to steer the submarine back, sweat beading on his brow. Kaz’s brow was furrowed, and Inej clasped her hands together, praying to every Saint she could think of – even Alina - that they would make it out of this alive.

The hand was long and delicate despite being so strangely formed, and it traced a simple single message on the glass, smearing something dark that didn’t wash away in the freezing currents. It was in a language Inej couldn’t read. “Nina, what does it say?”

Nina had gone deathly pale; her hands were tense in the way that they only became when she sensed something dead nearby. “It’s ancient Fjerdan,” she muttered. “I hope I get this right.”

_“I want the dead ones. All three. The crow, the drowned, and the Corporalki.”_

## Alina

Alina pushed back her lank white hair into the braid it was falling out of, straightening up from the tracks she was examining. Mal hadn’t helped her much when she was alive, but sometimes, when he couldn’t possibly ignore her shallow breathing and silent tears from being locked up inside the house too long, he had taken her out to the forest on lazy afternoons. She would stand, arms crossed, sunlight soaking into her skin, as he showed her how to hunt, how to track, how to read the patterns in the dirt the way she read ink on a cartographer’s map. He hadn’t been a great tracker anymore, not after he’d lost his ability, but he was still good enough that he could show her the ropes.

Now, she thought of him as she stared at the worn path in front of her. The Grisha had tried to conceal their tracks by covering it with windblown leaves when they fled from Irina’s house, but she could still see the general direction in which they had gone.

“He wants us to find him,” she said, turning to Zoya, who stood beside her scouring the trees for any sign of movement. “The tracks are still pretty obvious.”

“Maybe it’s a trap,” Zoya replied, tossing back her hair and staring in the direction that Alina was. “That’s what I would do if I was in his position.”

“Maybe he just wants me to find him,” Alina said quietly. Miserably. “Maybe then he’ll kill me.”

Zoya tilted her head to look at Alina more closely, her sapphire eyes narrowing. Alina could remember when she’d hated the sight of those eyes. Now, Zoya was like a sister to her, even if she was occasionally brutal and plain annoying.

“Alina,” she said matter-of-factly, “I hate the Darkling more than anyone. But it’s always seemed like you’re the only person he cared about. You’re the only person he’s chased for all this time. Sure, he wants Ravka, but what good is it if there’s nobody to watch him take it? To pat him on the back and say, ‘Well done, Darkles Sparkles, good job being an evil overlord?’”

Alina snorted. “So you think he keeps threatening me because he wants validation?”

“No, I think he can get validation from just about anyone. He scares them enough. But you’re important to him, for whatever reason. He won’t kill you.” Zoya’s gaze slid sideways, away from her. “That’s something that I’m ever so slightly jealous of. That no matter who wins this war, you’re almost guaranteed to make it out alive, one way or the other.”

“The Darkling kept me in a cell,” Alina pointed out. “And attacked and murdered my friends.”

“True,” said Zoya, and they walked deeper into the forest. “But did he kill you?”

“Well, technically –“ started Alina, but then they both stopped in their tracks.

Smoke hung in the air, heavy and ripe. Ashes scattered in the breeze and blew back into their faces as they stared, tense, at the clearing in front of them. Around the edges, once-green grass had withered and dried to an unpleasant, greyish-brown colour. In the centre, the ground was completely burned away in a nearly perfect circle. The blackened earth was recognisable as one thing, and one thing only.

A sun in eclipse.

“It’s his insignia,” said Zoya quietly, as if afraid to disturb the air.

“We were right,” breathed Alina. “He wanted us to be here.” She bent to touch the ruined grass; it flaked away beneath her fingertips, brittle and easily broken.

How long would he chase her?

“Stand up, Alina.” The voice that she’d been dreading rang through the clearing, loud and true.

The Darkling was here again.

Determined not to let him get to her, she knelt down further, running her hands through patches of grass until she was surrounded in a veritable cloud of ash. Trying not to cough, she looked up through the greyness, her eyes and heart on fire.

“Alina, what are you doing?” Zoya’s voice sounded as if it came from very far away.

“He’s here again,” she replied quietly. But of course, Zoya had no way of seeing the Darkling. This was a vision that only Alina could see, made possible by the strength of their bond, the bond that beat unsteadily like a dying heart between them both.

She could see the Darkling now, his face as unnaturally perfect as it had ever been, darkness wreathing his hands and leaking from him like ink in water. As the cloud of dust settled around her, he came into clearer focus. His eyes were a little wild, his beautiful black hair a little unkempt. His hands were clean, but if she stared at them long enough, she could picture blood on them. The blood of a hundred innocent people.

His gaze met hers. Her bones roared in their too-frail skin, and light flickered from her hands, erratic, uncontrollable, matching her heartbeat.

Stand up, he had said.

“I find I’m more comfortable down here on the ground,” she said quietly.

A smile crossed his face, then was gone in a flickering instant. Then he crossed the clearing to her and sat down across from her, so close that she could imagine his breath ghosting across her cheek. She had seen him die. This shouldn’t be possible.

“Then I shall sit with you,” he replied. The edges of his lips turned up ever so slightly, like leaves curling up before the heat of a fire. “Now we are equal.”

Alina choked on a laugh. “When have you ever wanted that?”

“Since the day I met you. You know, Alina, that you are the only person I’ve ever wanted to be my equal. The only one capable.”

“How terribly lonely it must be,” she said softly but not kindly, “to be so much better than everyone else. Do you want sympathy from me, Darkling? Do you want me to kiss everything better until you forget the horrors of everything you’ve done?”

Aleksander leaned forwards. They were close enough now that if she leaned forwards, she could press her lips to his. Those lips were ever so slightly parted. “Do you want me to lie, Alina?”

She held his gaze, steady, even as lightning arced up her veins. She was not a little girl anymore. She would not play by his rules, would not be a pawn. “Would that make your actions any better?”

“No, then. You don’t want me to lie. And so I’ll tell you the truth.” His eyes closed. “I do want that. You, Alina... You. I do want you, even still.”

Reaching a hand up, she placed a cool palm on his cheek. He felt insubstantial underneath her, a ghost that might fade away if she breathed out too hard. “Then why are you still acting like this?”

His eyelashes fluttered, a dark stain of oil against his tan skin. He was beautiful, and perfect, and a murderer. And she was the only thing alive that he still loved. Apart from Baghra.

 _Baghra._ The name jolted through her. “And what of Ravka?” she asked, her voice low.

“Ravka is mine, Alina.” He put one of his own hands over hers, pain flashing across his face. His eyes opened and he took his other hand, stroked her hair back. “I see that you are not to be conquered. But Ravka is not the same. It is a country, not a lover. And now it is my country.”

She jolted back, horrified, the phantom of his breath still fading from her lips. Crying out, Alina raised her hand, summoning an arc of light. The Cut blinded her as it slashed through his ghostly figure, dispelling the illusion of the Darkling back to wherever it had come from.

“What, in the name of all that is holy,” said Zoya incredulously, “was that?”

“We need to get back to the Little Palace,” said Alina, voice steady. She rose, letting her rage and power coil in her chest, letting it grow. “Now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh jeez i'm so sorry for not uploading in aaaages. i have no time! but recently i found a little sketch of a kostya/irina scene i had planned out. and i'm excited to get to it. so i am officially re-motivated and ready to write! thank you for putting up with me.  
> (also, ulla is a character from tlot but you don't really need to know much about her. sorry if i've spoiled you oops. that comes next chapter)


	11. Monstrous Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Beauty! Terrible Beauty! A deathless Goddess – so she strikes our eyes!”  
> — Homer, The Iliad  
> \-----  
> after Ulla demanded the dregs leave their submarine in the last chapter, the crows crew and irina have to reach a decision and face her.  
> -  
> kostya is emotional and slightly dangerous. possibly slightly dead. who'll ever know?  
> -  
> the darkling finally makes a move (interpret that how u will)  
> -  
> SCHEMING FACE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ulla is a character from The Language of Thorns by LB and she makes a short cameo here. Mild spoilers.

## Kaz

Kaz’s eyes narrowed as Nina read out the message. _I want all three. The dead ones. The crow, the drowned, and the Corporalki._ He had guessed that Ulla, the sea witch, might not even want to speak with any of them, that she probably had some kind of Grisha powers that could kill them all if she wanted. But he’d been banking on that shard of mirror and what it meant to her, the answers that they could have for her.

She might not want to kill them just yet.

It was a very small possibility, but still a possibility.

“Well, that’s just super cheerful,” drawled Jesper, breaking the uneasy silence. “ _The dead ones_. Really puts a positive spin on everything.”

Nina sighed, a long, kind of world-weary sigh. “She means me. There are no other Corporalki.”

Kaz raised an eyebrow. “Nina, you do eat a lot of waffles, but I don’t think Ulla could quite mistake you for three people.”

Nina smiled, laughing for a second, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “Couldn’t she? I’ll have to try harder. All the boys do love this body.”

“Not all the boys,” said Wylan, flushing pink as Jesper winked at him. Then the gloom of their situation settled down on all of them again.

“The crow and the drowned,” murmured Irina. “Anyone ever been drowned?”

Kaz looked around at all of them. He had _nearly_ drowned, once, the salty waters dragging him down, cold, decaying flesh all around him.... but he already knew who Ulla wanted them to send. He pushed the memories of Jordie away, looking at Inej; she was watching him with that knowing look on her face, as if she could understand everything he was thinking. He offered her a half smile. Inej grounded him.

“She wants me, Irina, and Nina,” Kaz said harshly. He looked at Irina. “Just how good at Tidemaking are you?”

-

Irina was still new to Tidemaking, and all she could summon for them was a bubble of air around each of their heads. Outside the submarine it was hard for Kaz not to feel like he was drowning, despite the deep breaths that he forced himself to inhale. Water pressed up against his skin, slick and cold, and it was difficult not to close his eyes.

He felt like he was a young boy again, frightened and lost, thrashing against the water, the dead bodies of Reaper’s Barge swimming around him. Their bloated corpses grinned, and he felt himself being pulled under.

 _Inej,_ he thought, and focused on the scene around him. He gritted his teeth. He’d dealt with worse than this before. He’d deal with it again.

Irina and Nina floated beside him, their hair spreading like ink through the flickering waters. Irina’s face was pinched tight in concentration as her wrists circled; she bit down on her lip. Probably something to do with moving the water currents so that the three of them stayed alive. He was freezing, shivering in the frigid waters, but he had the feeling that he’d be a lot colder if the little curly-haired girl wasn’t there to direct the relatively warmer currents their way.

Irina was an odd one. He’d taken one look at her and seen what he’d seen in so many of the desperate, frantic people on the Stave: something eating her away from the inside, something that had made her eyes go hard and dark, had turned that heart of hers into a little frozen husk. Inej had described her as a gentle, idealistic girl; he hadn’t paid much attention to that – after all, he’d met plenty of people like that, most of them pigeons looking to be plucked. But he’d had to stop himself from laughing every time Irina made a seemingly morbid comment. She just seemed so much like him when he had been younger.

Maybe that wasn’t such a good thing. Her poor mother wouldn’t want her to grow up to be a con like him, no doubt.

They swam silently through the ruins of a once-great city. All around them, wreckage lay in pieces. It was like someone had swept all the pieces off a chessboard  in a bout of anger, broken the chessboard for good measure, and chuckled it at the bottom of the sea to stew for a good several hundred years. Clinging arms made of seaweed and floating fronds tried to tug at him, eventually repelled by Irina’s control of the water. Still, he tried not to think about the water soaking him, reminding him. At least it wasn’t skin-to-skin contact.

Something sloshed through the weeds in front of them.

Soundlessly, Nina pointed towards a pile of rubble. Previously, Kaz had thought nothing of it, but he saw now that it was littered with various glass-like shards, piles tacked atop one another haphazardly. As he watched, they began to glow like the bonelight, green and unnatural and eerie. It was a clear path, marked out just for them.

He swore he could hear singing.

They moved forwards, propelled by Irina’s Grisha abilities, over the piles of glass. Things skittered away from the light, dark things with too many legs. Here and there, Kaz could make out jutting bones, the bare remains of a child’s lost doll, small things poking out from the rubble. An overturned fountain, spliced clean in half, lay on the seabed, moss covering it like a burial shroud.

Eventually, they reached the mouth of the cave. It was a bleak thing like a monster’s jaw, its craggy teeth green with age, swaying, colourless urchins like a tongue. The glass shards barely illuminated anything this deep in the ocean, especially with so little light filtering down. Kaz gritted his jaw. Why was he doing this again?

Now that he was here, though, he would get it done. The dark didn’t scare him. In fact, it should have been the other way around. _He_ was more frightening than the black depths of this cave.

He glanced at Nina and Irina. Nina looked grim, but he’d seen her at much worse moments, and he knew that she was a fighter through and through. It was Irina who he wasn’t sure could pull this off. There was something terrible in her eyes, something more like memory than a natural fear of all things deep and deadly.

Her gaze met his. Kaz raised an eyebrow in question. _You sure you can do this?_

She nodded. _Don’t like caves,_ she mouthed, but before he could think anything more of it, she had turned away again, ready to plunge in.

They entered together.

The further in they went, the more Irina’s hands trembled, and the colder the water became around them, so icy that it could eat him alive. _Keep it together, Lebedev,_ he thought. _We can make it through this._

If only so he could get back to the submarine and live another few days. If he could see the curve of Inej’s smile again, hear that sunshine laugh; if only so he could get back to his empire built on kruge and all his hard work.

His gaze lifted from the floor, and they saw her. Ulla. He had been banking on her existence, but even to someone like him, she was a terrible sight.

Inky grey-black hair swirled around her face in ruinous, toxic clouds; her skin was grey and dull and thick, riddled here and there with scars, and burnt all over in places, the marks of it clawing long arms up and down her body. A powerful tail stretched out from underneath her, and her eyes, lit up in the glow of the unnatural glass shards, were red as rubies, red as a dying sun, red as the remains of a man murdered in cold blood.

Underneath it all, though, she might have been beautiful once. There were the tiniest shards of it sprinkled in amongst the horrific ugliness that covered her. Maybe she was vain. Maybe he could use that against her.

A wide, vicious smile cracked her face in two as she observed them. “Children,” she crooned, and though her voice was as painful as the sound of nails down a chalkboard, there was an almost melodic tinge to it, as if she were about to burst into song. “You come to my grotto with a piece of my mirror, in the middle of the Kenst Hjerte.”

Kaz realised that the words her mouth was shaping didn’t match up with the ones he was hearing. She was speaking a language that he couldn’t understand, but by some kind of power, he heard  the words translated. His brow furrowed. He wondered if there were any Grisha that could do something like that. It was a skill that would pay well.

Nina nodded, slowly. She had grown up with stories about this woman, Kaz realised. She had much more fear built into her than Kaz did.

Kaz wasn’t sure he was afraid of anything, or merely disdainful.

“Why?” Ulla asked, swimming forwards so quickly that the small bubble of air around Kaz’s head flickered and sputtered; a few drops of seawater entered his mouth, and he coughed, until Irina’s fist clenched and he could breathe again.

“Your brother,” said Nina in halting Old Fjerdan. They had agreed that she was the best to talk to the witch; Kaz had already told her what to say. “We came to ask you about your brother.”

Ulla threw her head back and laughed, the noise echoing through the water, sounding more like a building collapsing or a home burning than a sound of true glee. “All this way? Over my brother? Why?”

“He calls himself the Darkling now. Your mother is still alive, too, and cares about you. He will destroy an entire country.”

Ulla considered this for a second, then growled, “It’s a bit late, you know. Besides. It will be nothing new. I destroyed one first.”

“For love, you did,” Nina said, and Ulla tensed.

“What do you know of that?”

“What everyone knows,” said Nina softly. “You have become a legend. A warning to little girls everywhere of what they might become. So has your brother, and so has his mother.”

“It is a family trait, I suppose.”

“You had a cousin,” said Nina suddenly. “Otkazat’sya – I mean, not gifted. He managed to be good and kind. His name was Malyen Oretsev.”

The grin returned to Ulla’s face, vicious and cruel. “The sea and the wind and the tides, they whisper many things to me. I already knew all of what you had told me, but I did not think you would be foolish enough to lie – Nina Zenik, daughter of mourning. Kaz Brekker, bastard of the Barrel. Irina Lebedev, courting death with your cold, icy heart. I know all of you, just as I knew what Malyen Oretsev was.”

“What was he?” asked Nina, and Kaz was glad her voice didn’t wobble.

The cloud of Ulla’s hair swirled around them. “Weak. Obnoxious. Afraid of true power,” the monstrous sea witch drawled, wrapping something around her finger – a necklace of bones, Kaz realised. “He nearly destroyed Alina. I am glad that my brother had the presence of mind to kill him.”

“What do you mean?” Nina’s voice was harried, fraying. _Stay strong, Zenik,_ he thought, glaring her way. “Alina loved him.”

“The ones who are supposed to love us are not always the ones that do,” said Ulla, her scarlet eyes flashing.

“So you won’t help us,” Kaz cut in bluntly. Nina turned shocked eyes on him, but it turned out that Ulla could understand Kerch just fine.

“No,” said Ulla. “I have no desire to drag myself up onto shore for my family’s sake to fight in a war over poor little Ravka. Still, little Irina, you have not spoken. What do you want to say? I can see the questions burning in your eyes.”

Kaz looked at Irina. Her sapphire eyes were glowing, sweat rolling down her forehead as she tried to keep the air around all of them, to keep them alive. “You’re not what I thought you would be,” she said finally.

Ulla smiled, but more gently, although Kaz could barely believe it. “What did you think I would be?”

“Angrier.” Irina’s voice was small. “Colder. Harder. Like how I feel. I know why you’re down here. Because the people you thought you loved – they betrayed you and left you to die, and I don’t understand how you can do everything so easily. Talk. Smile. Laugh.”

“Am I not angry?” Ulla’s voice was cutting. “Am I not bitter? Irina, you are only a child. You do not know what it is to have your pain fester for centuries; eventually it drags you down so low that you will never be able to let go. If I let myself be as awful as I wanted, all the time, I doubt any of these continents would even still exist. I would raze it all until there was nothing left.”

“Why not?” said Irina. She was watching Ulla fiercely now. Everyone in the Barrel would have turned their pockets inside out to watch a staring match like this. “You could.”

Ulla said nothing; instead, her livid scarlet eyes darkened a little, turning more purplish than crimson. She turned, leaving nothing but inky blackness, and in a moment she had disappeared into the shadowy recesses of the cave.

“Irina,” said Nina slowly, “I don’t think convincing the Fjerdan Sea Witch to destroy all of the observable world was a part of our plan.”

Irina shrugged. “It might make her happier.”

Kaz wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or cry. Instead, he said, “That might make a lot of people happier.”

“Should we leave?” Nina asked him. Her fingers were turning blue already, curling in on themselves.

But Kaz didn’t have a chance to reply; Ulla was back, and there was something large and cracked and shining clenched between her web-like hands. It was hard to tell, but Kaz thought that it was the mirror that his shard had been broken from.

“This mirror was made centuries ago,” Ulla rasped, shoving it into Nina’s frostbitten hands. “My brother will recognise it. It is all I am willing to give you, and I am only doing this because he was the only one who tried to save me all those years ago.”

Irina observed the witch with those oddly keen eyes. Then she nodded her head in thanks. “What do you ask in return?”

“The shard you brought down with you,” said Ulla, and Kaz drew it out of his pocket, offering  it up on his palm to her. It floated along a dark current until it was clenched in her webbed hands; she clutched it so tight that he could see blood leaking out from where it had dug into her skin. Her eyes gleamed as she looked back at Irina, a cruel smile playing on her lips.

“And, child...” she added, her powerful tail swirling in the water, “One more thing. When Kostya tells you he loves you, I want you to break his heart.”

## Kostya

Kostya’s fingers drummed across the tabletop as he ate in the huge dining hall of the Little Palace. Up and down the brightly gleaming countertops, students were strewn like marbles, the red-and-purple-and-blue of their respective kefta bright like beacons against the elaborately carved walls. His gaze was drawn to certain tables where popular Grisha held court, their heads high, their smiles broad.

The Little Palace was the most exquisite, ornate place he had ever been in his entire life. It was full of history and magic and architecture. Brimming with more  riches than he’d ever seen in his life.

And it had suddenly become meaningless again.

Everything. Black and dull and grey.

He’d had Irina back for such a short time, and every time he’d looked at her, he felt his skin tingle, felt his heart warm in his chest. Even his memories of her couldn’t compare to the real thing: Irina, eyes sparkling like the True Sea; Irina, head tilted back, drinking in the sunlight; Irina, scolding and smiling and keeping him sane.

Back when he had lived in the village, other boys had talked about what they liked, what they wanted from girls: a flash of skin, the fall of hair, the soft press of lips. Kostya looked at Irina and he couldn’t think about any of those things. Why would he, when there were much better things to think about? Like the way she only laughed properly when she was around him. The way she solved any problem she faced far quicker than he ever could – the way she made him want to do more, to be more. To be better than a simple village boy.

Kostya blinked, banishing the daydream of her from where he sat. Irina vanished, there and gone again.

So fast.

Too fast.

Without her, he felt hollow – a little strange, a little dangerous.

He had never felt this way before he was Grisha, as if his bones were chafing at his skin inside their casing, as if the power was a monster that lived inside him, waiting to be set loose. Maybe he was feeling this strange because he was slowly dying a little more every day, slowly sacrificing himself to the abyss that lived in him.

Maybe it was because he’d never like a girl quite this much before.

 _Focus, boy,_ Baghra’s voice snapped from inside his head. She sounded irked. _Bah. Teenagers and their feelings._

 _Why do I need to focus?_ he shot back, albeit with a  touch of amusement. After some time, Baghra had stopped seeming quite so terrifying. Less like a strange demon that could kill him, and more like the crotchety old woman that lived in his head and occasionally gave him advice.

 _Because they’re coming,_ Baghra whispered back hoarsely. It was a soft, coarse warning, one that Kostya knew to heed well.

He sat up straight, his nerves tingling with anticipation, and really, truly looked around. Some of the Grisha around him seemed nervous, picking at the threads of their kefta, others near-silent as they sat far too tensely. The hall was full of far more people than it normally would have been, but today, there was something lingering in the air; it felt like stormy clouds gathering over a grey field, ready to pour down rain.

Something was wrong.

Kostya stood up, pushing his chair back, not sure why he did it, except that if something was brewing, he didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire. He didn’t want to become even deader than he already was.

And then it struck.

Half of the lights in the dining room hall flickered out, blanketed by a thick wave of darkness. People shrieked; the scrabbling sounds of people falling over themselves stifled the air as they tried to run away from the blackening cloud that was now descending upon them all, heavy as a giant’s hand. He heard a little girl, probably no more than nine or ten, cry out for her Madraya, sobbing as she clutched at the girl next to her. Kostya himself backed away until he was pressed flush against the wall, trying to peer through the blackness, breathing hard.

There was only one other darkness summoner in all of Ravka.

“The Darkling,” came the fearful, terrified whispers.

And he was here.

 _My son,_ Baghra said, her voice full of a thousand emotions: pain and scorn and longing – and love, shot through with sorrow and hurt, but still love.

“Do you want me to stay?” he asked her thickly. His ears were starting to hurt.

 _No,_ Baghra’s voice echoed. _He might well kill you. Run, Kostya. Run the way I showed you._

“All right,” he muttered, hating himself.

He dashed to the nearest exit, trying desperately not to trip over the thick sprawl of limbs and chairs pushed to the ground. Kostya grabbed the darkness from the air and wrapped it around himself so that he was near-invisible, so that shadows trailed after him like skeins of the night sky. As he ran, he saw that some of the students had not been surprised by the attack at all, and instead had risen, hands over their hearts in a symbol of deference, waiting.

Then Kostya saw his first glimpse of the infamous Darkling. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Maybe for him to look older.

The Darkling wore a thick black kefta embroidered in gold, striding in as though he owned the place; adult Grisha walked behind him in bloodied, war-tattered uniforms, their heads held high and their hands held higher as the tang of the Small Science wove through the room. It was a small army.

Doubtless, the Darkling was there to continue what he had failed at before: conquering Ravka and taking the throne for himself.

 _It is not the prospect of Aleksander as king that worries me,_ Baghra said. _But it is the prospect of what might happen to him if he has no balance. If he goes too far._

Well, Kostya didn’t want to hang around for long enough to hear whatever the Darkling had to say. It was pretty damn obvious why he was there.

Cursing his loud footsteps, Kostya dashed through corridors, up the slippery marble stairs, up, and up, and up, to the highest place he could think of: one of the spires that reached up to the sky. He barrelled through half-forgotten, dusty rooms. He pushed aside huge cobweb curtains that hadn’t been touched in years, shoved aside a broken, battered chest. Finally, he collapsed onto the floor, head in his hands, breathing heavily, although his lungs didn’t quite fill all the way. They had started to die too. He could feel the cold blackness of it eating away at them.

Blinking to get the dust out of his eyes, he re-evaluated his options. He was at the top of a very, very tall tower – which was in some parts good, because it meant that nobody was likely to look for him up here – and was also an awful, terrible idea, because it meant there was no way out except for him to fall to his death. Or to go back down the stairs, face the Darkling’s guards, and escape into the city. And then what? He wasn’t an idiot. The Darkling wouldn’t have stormed the dining hall of the Little Palace, a place chock full of Grisha, without some kind of plan to reclaim the throne.

Saints, he was screwed.

He lay down on the rickety wooden floor, thinking. There was barely enough floor for him to lie with his knees bent and his feet pulled right up to him. Dust spun around him, little buzzing motes lit up by the sunlight that squeezed itself through the cracks in the walls.

Light. Sunlight. Of course. Sankta Alina had drawn him out of the Little Palace before, Kostya thought. She would be here to save them soon.

No. Kostya sat up, roughly shoving open the trunk that he’d shoved away only a few minutes before. The Darkling was here _now,_ and Sankta Alina was likely halfway across the country. She couldn’t save them.

But Kostya could try.

 _Foolish boy,_ Baghra muttered, and for once, he ignored her.

-

The Darkling’s guards didn’t see him as Kostya slipped into the dining hall.

As he’d expected, it was empty; the mess hall was, well, an utter mess. Chairs and tables were overturned, the floor littered with them. Kostya tugged the shadows more tightly around him, helping him to conceal himself from any watchful eyes. He was almost invisible like this.

He only needed to follow the sounds.

Out in the courtyard, several Grisha had been bound, their hands held fast behind their backs with handcuffs forged of Grisha steel; there would be no escape, even for the Fabrikators, many of whom were trying to no avail to free themselves. Around them stood people who had been their classmates – and maybe even their friends – only a few minutes ago. Each of them had a piece of black cloth tied around their right wrist, signifying their alliance with the Darkling.

Kostya’s heart went hard and dry.

He felt dangerous again.

He spotted the Darkling, sitting and talking with a group of some of the older students and his lieutenants. Unwillingly, he couldn’t help but notice how much the Darkling looked like a king; it was almost as if you could see an invisible crown perched atop his head, tilted to the perfect angle. He looked like a man born for commanding armies.

Kostya had thought that he would look more like a murderer.

 _That’s my son you’re insulting,_ Baghra snapped, and Kostya rolled his eyes.

 _Didn’t he try to kill you?_ he responded, moving closer to the Darkling.

It horrified him, too, how much he felt like he should kneel before the Darkling. Maybe it was the sheer power echoing off of the man, or maybe it was just that their power was the same, and they were linked. Having the Darkling as king felt... Right.

Kostya was so close to the Darkling now, he would trip over him if he fell. He was doubly glad for the invisibility that his ability afforded him, trying to keep his movements quiet, his breaths slow, as he reached into the pocket of his kefta. His shaking hands clenched the rusty dagger that he’d found earlier in that trunk at the top of the highest tower.

Kostya would have to strike fast.

He raised the dagger above his head, sucking in a breath –

And the Darkling’s head turned, ever so slightly, a knowing smile on his features. His eyes met Kostya’s, fierce and demanding, and it was all Kostya could do not to stumble back. The Darkling had known he was there the whole time. Had his shadowy trick not worked on the Darkling?

 _Don’t kill him!_ Baghra screeched, just as the Darkling raised a slender hand and Kostya’s disguise blew away like nothing but ashes on the wind. _Don’t kill my son!_

“Who,” murmured the Darkling, seizing Kostya’s knife easily and throwing it to the side, “are you?”

Kostya took a step back, and around him, a cacophony of gasps and yells rose through the air. He raised his hands, power flocking to him like a cloud of ravens, black and deadly.

His eyes found the Darkling’s, and he stared into his slate gaze with a cold conviction. And to his surprise, the Darkling actually... smiled.

“I asked you a question,” said the Darkling.

Kostya raised his eyebrows. “Did you?”

He gritted his teeth, gathered the strength inside himself, and _pushed._

Waves of power rolled down him, through him, out of his hands. Darkness pooled from Kostya like the choppiness of the sea in a storm. Everyone was screaming: in his head, all around him, but the Darkling just smiled as he raised a hand to stop the shadows.

 _No,_ thought Kostya, and sent out power twice as hard. Kicking into a run, narrowly avoiding a burst of Inferni fire from a supporter who had finally thought to use their power, he leaped onto a table. Easier than pushing through people. What had he been thinking? That he’d sneak up behind the most powerful man in Ravka and stick him in the back with a knife?

He was just Kostya. He wasn’t a king or a leader or a general. Just a little boy with stolen powers.

And he was seriously outclassed.

“Get him,” the Darkling commanded. His tone was lazy, a half-smile on his face, as though he knew that Kostya would never make it.

 _I have to get out,_ Kostya thought. Sweat dripped down his forehead. _For Irina._

But in the end, he was Kostya Grushov, and he was hopeless against a room full of fully trained Grisha. He tried his hardest. He really did. But eventually he felt chains press against his wrists and a boot kicking him to the ground. He hit the marble with a painful crack, wincing.

“I asked you who you were,” said the Darkling, gently turning Kostya’s face over with the tip of his shoe.

Kostya didn’t reply, only glared up. What would Irina say if she could see him now?

“Shouldn’t you know?” Kostya spat. “Since you know everything. Your Highness,” he added, his voice dripping with scorn.

 _Don’t tell him about me yet,_ came Baghra’s voice in his head. _He might kill you._

“His name is Kostya Grushov,” supplied one of the Squaller Grisha by the Darkling’s side, wringing her hands. Kostya shot her a glare that could have murdered her and her entire family.

“Kostya,” said the Darkling. His eyes narrowed. “Why are you so loyal to the Lantsov king? What problem do you have with me claiming the Ravkan throne?”

Disbelieving, Kostya yelled, “Of course I don’t want you on the throne! You’re a killer and a liar, and you only want the throne so that you can steal all the power for yourself! You think we don’t know about you?”

“Know what?” The Darkling’s tone was amused again.

“If you become king, you’ll wipe out entire cities. You’ll turn us into slaves and you’ll conscript all the Grisha. You’ll kill everyone I care about and... I don’t know. What else do Darklings do? My mother said you’d steal babies away from their parents and make milk sour the second you touched it.”

The Darkling started to laugh. “Is that really what you think?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Kostya yanked at his chains, chafing his wrists, but it was no use. “What have you ever done for us?”

“You think that because I control the shadows, it makes me evil?” asked the Darkling. “What do you think _you_ are, then, Kostya Grushov?” The Darkling lifted his hand; shadows flocked to it, whirring above his upraised palm like a tornado.

“I don’t know,” Kostya said. “But I’m not like _you_. That’s what matters.”

“What I have _done_ ,” said the Darling, more harshly now, “is given the Grisha a safe haven. A place where they can be themselves without fear of judgement. Before I came, we were _nothing_. We were hunted and slaughtered as witches. We still are. And when I am king, I will change that. Nobody will ever dare harm a Grisha again, in these lands, or outside. We will not worry about _jurda parem_ ; we will punish those who have wronged us and take steps to ensure it will never happen again.”

Kostya felt weak. “Nice speech.”

“Indeed.” The Darkling straightened. “Take him to the dungeons. Alina will already be on her way. We’ll be ready for her when she comes.”

Kostya couldn’t help the fear that shot through him. His breathing hitched. Last he’d heard, Alina had been travelling with Irina. If they were going to return – if they were going to kill them –

It was alright. _You have a plan,_ he reminded himself. He could still communicate with Irina. If they didn’t murder him first.

“Interesting.” The Darkling’s eyes flashed, and that was the last that Kostya saw of him before rough hands seized him and he was pulled down into the depths of the Palace.

## Irina

Her skin was buzzing and her head was pounding and she felt a million different kinds of beaten-up. She wanted nothing more than to curl up on the side of the boat and cry. Or maybe sleep. Sleep and never wake up.

Why did everything have to hurt so much? Why couldn’t the things in her past stay there – in the past? Why did she _let_ things in to hurt her?

When she breathed in, she thought of Anastasiya, who had abandoned her, and it made her sick with longing. When she breathed out, she remembered her sister’s betrayal, and it made her dizzy with anger. It was a constant, destructive cycle, and she wanted nothing more than for it to end.

_When Kostya tells you he loves you, I want you to break his heart._

Why would Ulla – the Sea Witch, for Saints’ sake – why would _Ulla_ care about what two teenagers thought about each other? Why would Ulla want Irina to hurt Kostya?

 _Maybe he doesn’t love me_ , she tried to convince herself. Maybe Ulla had only been toying with her emotions. Maybe it meant nothing at all.

“You alright?”

Irina looked up to see Inej approaching. Every step was perfectly economical, balanced, precise. How did Inej manage it? How had Inej survived the world?

“I’m okay,” Irina said, trying and failing to mask the hoarseness in her voice. “Just a little shaken.”

“Kaz told me about what it was like down there,” said Inej, crossing her arms with all the grace of an acrobat. “Well, Kaz told me the bare bones and Nina filled in the rest. But I have an idea.”

“She was awful.” Irina rolled over, stretched her legs, and stood up. The boat’s deck felt unsteady beneath her, so she leaned on the rail and looked out to the sea. That didn’t help, though.

Today, the sea was tumultuous, ever-changing. In some parts, it shone blue like sapphires; in others, it was grey as slate, grey as the clouds above it. Just like Kostya’s eyes: one minute cobalt, the next the colour of stone. She’d often wondered at the way his irises shifted colour.

“Don’t give in,” Inej said suddenly, drawing Irina out of her haze. “Don’t stop fighting. Sometimes it’s easier to give up – to let the anger and resentment take over until it completely rules your life.”

“How?” Irina said, trying to sound nonchalant. “How do you cope?”

“Find a dream.” Inej walked over, placed her hands on the ship’s side next to her. “Find something to cling to. Mine was the schooner. Nina’s was Ravka, and....” Inej paused, clearly omitting something – or someone. “Wylan and Jesper wanted each other.”

 “What about Kaz?” Irina asked. She wouldn’t have thought that Dirtyhands would ever have had something as noble as a dream.

“Revenge.” Inej’s face was closed off. “But the thing about revenge is that once you have it, you don’t have anything else left. It leaves you empty.”

“It would be nice to have revenge on the Darkling, though.”

Inej drummed her fingers. “Think of all the people _he_ must want revenge on.”

“What? Do you mean Alina?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Who knows how a monster thinks?”

Irina thought of the way she’d casually told Ulla to destroy all of the countries in the entire world. “Sometimes I feel a little like a monster myself,” she admitted.

Inej laughed. “Don’t we all?”

-

Hours later, Irina made an effort to talk to them. She forced herself to smile and chat and laugh as they shared their meal inside the captain’s cabin.

Inej caught her eye and smiled.

“We need waffles,” Nina pouted, leaning back. Her hair glistened in the firelight.

“Shut _up_ , Nina,” said Kaz; he was almost smiling, though. “We don’t have the money to fund your extravagant hobbies.”

“Money, money, money,” sighed Jesper. He was curled up on a seat with Wylan, his shoes kicked off. “Don’t you think we have enough?”

“Ah,” said Wylan. He straightened, pulling a grim, serious face. “You can never have enough money, Jesper,” he said, in a passable imitation of Kaz’s accent.

“Wylan,” said Kaz nonchalantly, “if you want to keep all your flute-playing fingers intact, that had better not have been a joke about me.”

“Of course it wasn’t,” Wylan protested. “It was about Irina.”

Irina snorted. They probably couldn’t tell, but she’d been brought up as poor as dirt. “Sure, Wylan.”

“They’re all millionaires,” Inej informed her. “Sometimes it goes to their heads.”

“Millionaires?” gasped Irina. “Saints above, how the hell did you get so much money?”

Jesper’s hand went to his side. A Zemeni revolver hung there, gleaming and smooth. “Well, it’s a long story. It involves drugs, the Yul-Bo family, Jan Van Eck, and most importantly, a stunningly handsome sharpshooter –“

“A brilliant demo expert,” chimed in Wylan.

“A criminal mastermind,” said Inej, looking at Kaz.

He didn’t miss a beat. “The best spy in the Barrel, too.”

“Don’t forget the gorgeous, powerful Grisha Heartrender,” added Nina, brightening. Then something dark clouded her eyes. “And an escaped convict.”

The mood in the room darkened. It was like someone had blown out a candle – it was that fast, that cold.

To her surprise, it was Kaz who spoke up. “His name was Matthias. He was a good man.”

“More than just good,” said Nina softly. Her hands had curled in the lap of her dress. “He was noble. Pure. Fierce. A true drüskelle.”

 _Drüskelle?_ Irina wondered. Weren’t they the Fjerdans who hunted down Grisha for fun?

She didn’t have much time to think on it, though. Something hummed against her skin, just over her heart. It was her Saints’ bone, the one that she usually wore looped around her neck with a bit of string. Once, she’d thought it was Sankta Alina’s finger bone; now, it was a reminder of all she’d been through, everything she’d lost.

It was also a way to talk to Kostya.

She pulled it off quickly and stared at it. The bone seemed to leak darkness, spilling into the air like a cloud. It coalesced and hardened into the face of a man – no, not a man, a boy, _her_ boy, Kostya.

“Ree,” he whispered.

The others were all leaning forward now, watching intently. Nina shot Irina a questioning glance, but none of the others recognised him.

Of course they wouldn’t. But Irina would know him anywhere.

“Kos! What are you doing?”

“I don’t have much time to talk,” he said hurriedly, his voice low and determined. “The Darkling has taken the Little Palace. If you’re with Alina, don’t come. He’s waiting on you. Counting on you.”

“What?”

Kostya pressed his lips together worriedly. The image of him was hazy in the smoke, unfinished, but she could still sense the nervousness that ran through him like a chemical shockwave. “The Darkling is here.”

“Is he going to usurp Nikolai?” Nina asked. Kostya didn’t seem to hear, so Irina repeated it.

“Yes.” Kostya didn’t hesitate. “I’m locked up in his dungeons right now. In fact, I think King Nikolai is locked up too, a few doors down; I heard the guards talking.”

“By the Saints,” whispered Irina. But she shouldn’t have been surprised, should she? That was what the Darkling did. He stripped you away from the people you cared about. First he had taken her mother and her old home, then her sister; now he was going to steal the second home she’d found.

And he’d taken Kostya.

“What do you think—“ she started to say, but Kostya’s eyed widened before she could finish the question.

“I have to go. Someone’s coming. But remember, Ree, Irina, I—“

The smoke vanished. She tried to grab it with her fingertips, to try and pry his final words from the fading shadows; but he was gone. All that was left was empty air and the five people around her.

Kaz  had leaned forwards. A contemplative look was on his face as he propped his head up on the table; his eyes were distant, focused.

“Scheming face,” whispered Nina.

“Definitely,” replied Inej.

“Well, that settles it,” declared Jesper, stretching as he yawned. But there was a gleam in his eye – an anticipation for the fight to come. “We’re planning another break-in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AGAIN i apologise for the lack of content! but i still love these characters and want to finish the story.  
> also, i was working on my own original stuff lately, and i just finished the first draft of my own story! so i'll be writing this in between since i'm planning to kill a bit of time before i start rewriting and editing it.  
> thank you to everyone who still reads this! ily all. and we're getting closer and closer to all of the ships getting together and tbh im excited


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